The DMA boosts email click rate by 54%, achieves a 98% inbox placement rate with Everest.

As a membership organization, the DMA relies on the email channel to build and maintain relationships with members.

“Email is our most effective customer relationship management channel. We use email for everything from influencing data legislation to promoting our educational webinars,” explained Shruti Gunjal, Head of Digital and Data Marketing at the DMA. “Communicating with our members is fundamental to them getting any value from us.”

But the unique nature of the DMA’s business makes maintaining a successful email program complicated. The email team must juggle both B2B and B2C audiences in its marketing outreach.

Furthermore, a complex customer decision-making unit makes list segmentation a challenge. The DMA’s customer database includes a wide range of job titles, including executive, human resources, legal, data, business development, and marketing roles.

“We send to so many email segments,” explained Gunjal. “While our volumes may be relatively small, our email needs are highly complex and sophisticated.”

Prior to partnering with Validity, the DMA team used a shared IP address infrastructure to send emails. This led to mounting deliverability issues and underwhelming email response rates.

While the DMA suspected its inbox placement rates were less than optimal, the organization lacked the visibility of email performance needed to identify and solve these issues.

After partnering with Validity, the DMA’s email performance improved across the board.

The organization now enjoys:

• An average sender score of 99
• Certified Microsoft inbox placement rates of 100 percent (Outlook.com and Office 365)
• Gmail inbox placement rates of 98 percent (Gmail and Google Workspace)
• 100 percent inbox placement at major filtering companies like Proofpoint and Mimecast

These providers represent over 90 percent of the DMA’s email activity, meaning the vast majority of both B2B and B2C members are benefiting from this improved performance.

Overall, the DMA now maintains an average weighted inbox placement rate of 98 percent, illustrating the organization’s blue-chip reputation with major mailbox providers, hosted corporate email platforms, and global spam filter vendors.

This outstanding performance has given the DMA confidence to introduce new segmentation tactics, enhanced email templates, and an updated email preference center. The combined impact of these efforts has significantly moved the needle towards higher subscriber engagement, and the DMA’s own key performance indicators highlight this positive impact.

This table compares engagement with the DMA’s email program during the 90-day periods before and after achieving Sender Certification. These results show the DMA’s subscribers are not only engaging more frequently with emails, but are now more responsive to the calls to action in those emails as well.