Case Study: Web 2.0 Runs on Email

By Matt Blumberg
CEO & Chairman

It's fashionable in many circles to toll the death knell for email. Part of the reason for that is the rise of Web 2.0 - blogging, social networking, and other methods of interaction that supposedly make email obsolete.
The funny thing is, Web 2.0 tends to rely pretty heavily on email. All those LinkedIn and Facebook emails are the things that drive huge amounts of activity on the sites.

Take Twitter as another example. While Twitter has successfully created a whole new communication method (complete with the verb "to Twitter" and the noun "tweet") a large number of their new members come through email. Specifically they come from peer-initiated email, aka forward to a friend email. Unfortunately for them, a lot of that email was being blocked or junked. This is a common problem for any company that has email forwarding on their site.

Fortunately for Twitter, one of their venture capital investors is Fred Wilson, who also happens to be on our Board. He made the introduction and the rest, as they say, is history.

In this case study you'll see how bad their problem really was (examples: just 25% of their emails were making it into Yahoo! inboxes and only 16.7% got delivered to Hotmail). More importantly, you'll find the action steps that helped them increase their Sender Score reputation rank from 30 to 70 and get much more of their email to the inbox. As with most email deliverability stories, there was no ONE BIG THING that helped them. Instead they needed to make a bunch of small fixes that added up to a better reputation.

Once that good reputation was established, deliverability chugged upward.

Read the case study to find out exactly what Twitter did to score big.