How We Helped Zinch Achieve Superior Email Deliverability and Reputation
Email marketing is one of the most influential business tools to connect with customers and drive sales. However, an email marketing campaign's success depends on several factors, including email deliverability, warm-up, and reputation improvement. In today's world, where the average person receives dozens of emails daily, your emails must be delivered to the inbox and not filtered out as spam.
That's where our team comes in. In this case study, we'll explore how we helped Zinch achieve superior email deliverability and reputation, resulting in increased engagement. We worked closely with the Zinch team to develop a customized email marketing strategy to improve their email deliverability and reputation.
One of our biggest challenges was the need to warm up Zinch's email-sending domain. Warm-up is a process that involves gradually increasing the volume of emails sent from a new domain to establish a positive reputation with email providers. It's a crucial step that can take weeks or even months to complete, but it's essential to achieving long-term success with email marketing.
Through strategic planning, careful monitoring, and ongoing adjustments, we successfully warmed up Zinch's domain and improved its email deliverability and reputation multiple folds.
So, let's dive in and see how we did it!
Client Background
Small businesses are the backbone of any economy, but many of them struggle to access financing solutions that are easy to understand and use. That's where Zinch comes in. Since 2004, they have provided fast and convenient financing options to small businesses, aiming to make financing more inclusive and accessible to all. With a focus on simplicity and flexibility, Zinch's product family has been tailored to the unique needs of their customers, ensuring that they have the support they need to thrive and grow.
Metrics
After working with Zinch for 5 months, our team significantly improved their email deliverability and reputation.
1.
Improved Domain Reputation from
Bad to High
2.
Achieved
Open Rates - 40%, CTOR - 60%
3.
Brought down bounce rate from
10% to 0.55%
Prime Goals And Challenges Faced
The primary goals of Zinch for this case study were to:
Successfully start their email marketing journey with a well-planned strategy.
Clean and prepare their contact list of 81,000+ contacts for warm-up.
Improve their domain's reputation, which had a bad start, and achieve superior email deliverability for their marketing campaign.
Key Challenges faced included:
The contact list was sizable, and the client had not engaged its prospects before. So the performance of the data was unknown.
With a bad reputation in the initial stage, the client had to overcome the risk of being marked as spam by email providers, which could have negatively impacted their email deliverability.
Cleaning a list of 81,000+ contacts and preparing the final list can be time-consuming and challenging, mainly if it contains outdated or inaccurate information.
Client Experience Showcase
With the help of InboxArmy, LLC, the client was able to skyrocket their email marketing campaign, reaching and engaging with over 5,000 prospective and existing customers like never before. The InboxArmy team seamlessly integrated with the client's internal team, offering strategic expertise and a proactive approach to ensure the campaign stayed on track and produced outstanding results.
Testimonial
“The working relationship has been great. InboxArmy experts are on top of the campaigns and act as an extension of our team to manage all aspects of our email campaigns. Their strategic expertise and experience with the channel as well as their proactive approach, make sure campaigns stay on track. So far, we are very satisfied with the quality of their service and overall performance.”
- Department Head, Zinch
Strategy Devised
01
Carefully handling list cleaning
Removing any duplicate, outdated, or inaccurate information to improve the list's quality and reduce the risk of emails bouncing.
02
Creating a winning Email warm-up plan
Establishing a positive reputation with email providers without having any filters flag the domain for spam.
03
Having a backup (list recleaning)
There is always the risk of invalid contacts or outdated email addresses in email lists. To mitigate this risk, we planned to implement a list-recleaning process to ensure the emails remained up-to-date and accurate.
04
Seamless recalibration
Monitoring key metrics such as open, click-through, and bounce rates to identify improvement areas. Make data-driven adjustments to the campaign to improve its effectiveness and achieve the best possible results.
Agile and Adaptive Process
Phase
Scoping for initial issues
As we delved into our work with Zinch, we quickly realized that their email domain had a tarnished reputation. We knew we needed to take a systematic approach to identify and resolve the issues.
We started by sending emails in small batches and monitoring the results closely. Unfortunately, our initial attempts yielded high bounce rates ranging from 2.2% to 6%. It was clear that something needed to change.
We decided to focus on isolating the root cause of the problem and separating the domains. Our experts identified that Yahoo emails had a 0% open rate and a shocking 14% bounce rate. This was a significant finding since the industry’s standard bounce rates range from 0.5 - 1%.
After further investigation, we discovered that Yahoo accounts that have been inactive for 12 months are usually disabled. But when these accounts are checked for deliverability, they respond with a valid mailbox status. Thus, when we tried sending emails to these addresses, they would lead to a hard bounce, causing the high bounce rate we had initially encountered.
We realized that we needed to avoid Yahoo email addresses to achieve better email deliverability and reputation. With this change, the metrics improved. The open rate rose to 10%, and the bounce rate was 1.5 - 3%. Our scoping helped us identify the problem and adapt our strategy to deliver the best results for Zinch.
Phase
Tackling low open and high bounce rates
The team was excited to ramp up the campaign to the next level. However, as soon as we took action, we faced a familiar problem - low open and high bounce rates.
We immediately put the campaign on hold and went back into analysis mode, knowing that we needed to identify the root cause of the issue before moving forward.
Our deliverability analyzed the data and conducted in-depth checks. The consensus was that email data had an inherent quality issue not resolved by past cleaning efforts.
Tackling this head-on, we worked tirelessly to develop a new approach to the data-cleaning process, knowing that we needed to be agile and adapt to our challenges.
Phase
Executing list re-cleaning
We rolled up our sleeves and got to work on the list re-cleaning process by turning to Alfredknows.com. Alfred segregates each email address by giving them a score between 1 and 10 based on quality. We were left with 27,800 contacts, which provided us with 26,591 final contacts after cleaning the list.
Our experts decided on a gradual delivery approach to ensure that we maintained a good sender reputation. For the initial days, we only targeted prospects with a score of 10. This way, we were confident that the emails would reach the right people without getting marked as spam. Then, as we moved forward, we added a few emails from scores 9 and 8 with 10 to manage all the contacts. Finally, the experts ensured that we do not send emails to prospects with scores between 1-3, as they were not considered viable.
And the results were phenomenal. We saw a significant bounce rate reduction, which came down to 0% on most days. This step helped us achieve superior email deliverability and improved Zinch's sender reputation.
Phase
Amping up the 2nd campaign
After analyzing Zinch's email performance, we realized that although the first warm-up email campaign showed promising results, we still had some work to do to achieve the desired email deliverability and reputation.
We noticed that the engagement of ‘warm-up email 1’ had slowed down, and our domain reputation was still not where we wanted it to be. That's when we decided to take the next step in our agile and adaptive process: amping up the 2nd campaign.
Our team carefully planned a new campaign targeting those who had engaged with the first warm-up email. We continued our throttling sends approach, ensuring we didn't overload our recipients' inboxes and risk damaging our reputation.
Consequently, the open rates for the 2nd campaign skyrocketed to 22-32%, and the bounce rate remained impressively low. However, within 30-35 days, we saw a significant improvement in our domain reputation, moving from bad to low and low to medium.
Phase
Approaching with caution
As we progressed in our journey to help Zinch achieve superior email deliverability and reputation, we knew we had to approach it cautiously. While seeing positive results, we didn't want to get ahead of ourselves and risk damaging our progress.
Despite the temptation to increase the number of daily sends, we knew it was crucial to be patient and let our warm-up process work its magic. After all, our client was new to email marketing, and their domain reputation was still a work in progress.
We also noticed that increasing sends to over 250 prospects for Warm-up Email 1 had caused issues with open and bounce rates. Some days, we were even facing the problem of zero open rates. To address this issue, we decided to suppress prospects created before 2019.
The team was determined to take a cautious approach and focus on steady progress rather than rushing to hit our targets. And our strategy paid off - slowly but surely, we were approaching our goal of achieving a high domain reputation.
Finally, on 26th August 2022, after just over five months since the first send on 25th March 2022, we achieved our target of a 'HIGH' domain reputation - a testament to our agile and adaptive process and ensuring long-term success for the client!
Key Takeaways
Achieving superior email deliverability and reputation requires patience, consistency, and effective communication. Here are key takeaways from the engagement with Zinch:
About InboxArmy
Email marketing is one of the most influential business tools to connect with customers and drive sales. However, an email marketing campaign's success depends on several factors, including email deliverability, warm-up, and reputation improvement. In today's world, where the average person receives dozens of emails daily, your emails must be delivered to the inbox and not filtered out as spam.
Contact our email deliverability agency if you need help.
