Case Study

Morning Brew

MORNING BREW

With over one million subscribers, Morning Brew’s goal is to educate and inform young professionals about the latest news in business and technology. While traditional business news can be dry and dense, Morning Brew uses an unconventional witty and charismatic style of journalism to provide an enjoyable (and informative) reading experience.

CHALLENGE

Initially as a small startup of a just a few employees, Morning Brew had limited resources (and knowledge) about the email space. They were inexperienced and were faced with the challenge of scaling their newsletter audience extremely quickly.

Morning Brew began by taking calls with countless “experts” in the space who have scaled massive email lists. They were challenged to learn email best practices and make use of new analytics and tools on the fly as they scaled incredibly fast. On top of this, they were migrating to a new email service provider (ESP) at the same time.

SOLUTION

When migrating to a new ESP, the technical specifications and infrastructure of their program shifted dramatically. Morning Brew used the Return Path Platform to monitor IP reputation incredibly closely on a daily basis, to ensure that the health of their IP addresses was not impacting their deliverability during this transition.

This monitoring became even more important when they migrated again from a shared IP address to two dedicated IP addresses. Now that they had complete ownership of reputation of these IP addresses, monitoring their health became even more important. Checking the deliverability for different mailbox providers within Campaign Overview became a routine practice and allowed them to identify problems with specific providers—and of course Return Path was there to support and assist when necessary.

Aside from monitoring reputation and feedback loops with Return Path, Tyler and team also take a proactive approach and routinely use the spam test prior to sending campaigns. This way, they can be sure their emails are optimized for deliverability from a technical approach. Eliminating “red flags” within their emails ensures that their audience receives their emails most reliably.

Lastly, now that their two dedicated IP addresses were in top shape, Morning Brew felt the need to do all they could to make sure their subscribers received the emails they were expecting on a daily basis. For this reason, Morning Brew took the necessary steps to get approved and enrolled into the Return Path Certification program, the industry’s most powerful and unique whitelist.

“Our email program was getting to be of such high volume, it was a no-brainer that the investment of Certification was well worth the related ROI”.

Tyler Denk
Product & Growth Lead

RESULTS

With the combination of Return Path’s email expertise, deliverability monitoring, and Certification benefits, Morning Brew has improved their inbox placement rate from ~60 percent to 99 percent, and open rates from ~20 percent to ~45 percent.

Following are “before and after” images showing the difference that Return Path made to Morning Brew’s campaign metrics.