Southwest Airlines Achieves First-Class Email Deliverability with Validity Everest and Sender Certification.

As a major airline, Southwest relies on email as one of its channels to engage with current and prospective Customers.

The Company’s email deployments typically fall into two major categories:

1. Promotional emails advertising sales on air travel, Rapid Rewards® loyalty program promotions, and co-branded credit card acquisition offers.
2. Transactional/operational emails that update travelers with purchase details, flight information, and loyalty program status.

“Email is a high-performing communication channel for us and another avenue for Southwest to share our legendary Hospitality,” explained Jason Permenter, Southwest’s Manager of Campaign Development. “It opens a pathway for the Company to communicate directly with our Customers, encouraging them to take action, and allowing us to measure an immediate impact.”

However, maintaining an email program of this size requires widespread support.

Southwest Airlines often utilizes robust imagery in its promotional templates to reflect seasonality and booking trends, but the Company is aware that it should be mindful to avoid stricter spam filtering from mailbox providers when using this approach.

On the transactional side, timely email deliverability is crucial for providing a smooth flying experience for Southwest Customers. These messages can include anything from receipts for flight transactions to pre-trip messages confirming a passenger’s itinerary.

The Southwest Team identified that additional in-depth campaign insights were important in maintaining a successful program.

“Excuse the plane puns, but without visibility of our deliverability or inbox placement, we were flying blind,” said Permenter. “Simply deploying our campaigns wasn’t enough. We needed a smooth landing in subscribers’ inboxes.”

Southwest decided to secure a reliable email deliverability partner as they focused on scaling their program while maintaining the superior quality that subscribers had come to expect.

“Excuse the plane puns, but without visibility of our deliverability or inbox placement, we were flying blind.”

Jason Permenter, Manager of Campaign Development at Southwest Airlines

Southwest turned to Validity, the leading provider of email deliverability and CRM data quality solutions, to support email performance enhancements.

Southwest’s partnership with Validity allowed them to significantly consolidate their marketing tech stack for design testing and deliverability monitoring.

“We can do so much for our email program all from one platform,” said Permenter. “Having deliverability and design solutions under one roof is a game-changer.”

The level of detail provided by Everest’s Inbox Placement Insights feature allowed Southwest to analyze their performance beyond the data provided by their ESP.

Everest’s List Validation module also plays an essential role in the Company’s strategy for validating active email addresses before they are added to Southwest’s email list. Southwest takes advantage of Everest’s automated processing of the email addresses they acquire through online signups, as well as manual processing after ad-hoc marketing events.

Everest’s Design and Content module allows the airline to test how email content will appear across various device types and email applications to ensure messages render properly for subscribers.

“It’s important that we send on-brand, well-rendered messages, regardless of where our Customers choose to receive them,” said Permenter. “Adding this layer of testing has been an important step towards standardizing how our emails appear across the board.”

With their deliverability on firm footing, Southwest’s Marketing Team qualified for Validity’s exclusive Sender Certification program, which places them on a shortlist of trusted senders among key mailbox providers like Microsoft and Yahoo.

The Certification program provides them with advanced security monitoring features and a dedicated Compliance Team that monitors Southwest’s email program around the clock. This level of campaign protection is crucial for large companies.

“We love that the tools are intuitive, provide us with proactive notifications, and can scale across programs as our needs expand,” said Permenter.