Online Education achieves 98% overall inbox placement with Validity Everest.

Online Education’s email program is a foundational part of their business strategy. Since the company functions without a call center, the sales and marketing teams depend entirely on email to communicate with prospective students.

Most of Online Education’s sales come from email subscribers who discover them via Google search and are then marketed to through a series of offers throughout the year. The sales cycle is relatively long, so making multiple contacts via email keeps prospective students engaged and interested in what the company has to offer.

Online Education has over 100 websites serving customers in 35 countries, meaning both deliverability and engagement are influenced by local standards, customs, and laws. Measuring and responding to these multiple influences becomes exponentially harder without a helicopter view of email program performance.

The marketing team uses a custom-built tech platform to design and schedule their email campaigns. However, this platform provides little visibility into inbox placement, spam trap hits, and other important “below the surface” metrics, making it difficult to monitor email performance and adjust their strategy. As a result, they experience poor inbox placement at major mailbox providers.

For instance, a large percentage of emails sent to Microsoft users lands in the spam folder. This not only has a significant impact on sales, but also on students who are unable to receive login details and other important information about their courses. It also creates a significant customer service overhead as high volumes of missing email queries have to be responded to.

Online Education started with a zero percent inbox placement rate at Microsoft. After qualifying for Validity’s Sender Certification program, their inbox placement rate skyrocketed to 100 percent. They’ve also maintained 100 percent inbox placement at Gmail.

“Sender Certification really was a game changer,” Mondello said. “It helped us achieve inbox placement rates we could only have dreamed of pre-Certification.”

With greater visibility into their email performance, they’ve been able to adjust their strategy in real time and maintain a 98.1 percent average inbox placement rate across all major mailbox providers (Gmail, Microsoft, and Yahoo/AOL, as well as important regional providers like BigPond, Iinet, and TPG). The improved performance at Gmail is particularly valuable as this MBP represents 70% of Online Education’s subscribers.

As a result, their average sender reputation score has risen to 97, placing them in the top decile among other best-in-class senders. These improvements have resulted in more sales and conversion of opportunities. They have also ensured students are receiving important information on their journey of self-discovery.

The Certification process helped the team reflect on and improve some of their internal processes, such as database cleanliness, which has had an immense impact on performance. The key for Online Education has been to rely on data to guide their strategy.