Mercedes-Benz increases email deliverability rate by 10% after partnering with Validity.
The challenge:
Implementing more relevant, personalized email campaigns—while facing mounting deliverability issues.
Historically, the marketing team at Mercedes-Benz USA tailored their digital communications to each customer’s vehicle identification number (VIN). As such, Mercedes-Benz’ email campaigns focused primarily on providing customers with information about their vehicles, without acknowledging each customer’s unique history with the brand. This one-size-fits-all approach to email undermined the highly personal nature of vehicle ownership.
Mercedes-Benz sought to overhaul this long-embedded strategy by creating a “New Owners Welcome Series.” This email series provided each customer with relevant, streamlined, and personalized communications based on their history with the brand—not just their newly-purchased vehicle’s attributes.
In a larger sense, Mercedes-Benz sought to create a communication journey that could be tailored to each customer on a personal level.
But first, Mercedes-Benz knew they needed to improve their email deliverability. The biggest deliverability challenge they faced was lack of data regarding a relatively low deliverability score. The team at Mercedes-Benz knew something was wrong, but they didn’t have the insights needed to visualize and diagnose their issues.
The solution:
A partnership with Validity, the leading provider of email deliverability and data quality solutions.
Mercedes-Benz was eager to implement their new welcome series. But the first step in this strategy was ensuring their welcome emails actually made it to subscribers’ inboxes. Thus began a concerted effort by Mercedes-Benz to improve their overall email deliverability rate.
Without reliable deliverability, their newly-designed customer experiences were almost guaranteed to fall flat. That’s why Mercedes-Benz decided to partner with Validity, the market-leading provider of email deliverability and data quality solutions.
Validity provided Mercedes-Benz USA with the tools needed to monitor specific measures of deliverability, including unknown user rates and complaint rates.
Mercedes-Benz also leveraged Validity’s email deliverability platform to monitor and correct specific issues that were affecting their inbox placement rate.
This visibility empowered Mercedes-Benz to confidently home in on the underperforming areas of their email program.
“Validity played an integral part in helping us optimize our deliverability metrics and improve our Sender Score. We also used Validity’s email solutions to monitor the success of our efforts to ‘warm up’ brand new IP addresses. Validity helped us achieve a 10 percent increase in deliverability rate year over year.”
Victoria O’Neill – Senior Full-Stack Developer, Mercedes-Benz
The results:
Improved email deliverability and prompt, personalized customer outreach.
With support from Validity, Mercedes-Benz improved their overall email deliverability rate from 86 percent to 95 percent.
Furthermore, the company gained the visibility and strong deliverability foundation needed to enhance and streamline their overall email communication strategy. After onboarding with Validity, the team at Mercedes-Benz was able to consolidate more than a dozen separate communications into a single customer journey, comprised of three core emails and four possible follow-up emails. These emails were delivered only to customers who met specific criteria.
As a result of this enhanced strategy, Mercedes-Benz now delivers their initial welcome message within 24 hours post purchase. This nets out to a 96.67 percent improvement in response time after the most significant event of the customer lifecycle.
Mercedes-Benz also reduced the average number of days it takes for a new owner to add their vehicle identification number to the Mercedes-Benz mobile app (“Mercedes me”) from 23 days to 10 days. This is a crucial success metric for Mercedez-Benz, as the marketing team relies on this information to tailor communications and follow-up support effectively.
Mercedes-Benz was founded in 1926. Since then, the organization has sought to combine luxury with performance across a full line of automobile models. With vehicles manufactured in 17 countries across five continents, their vehicles are distributed and enjoyed all over the world.