Association of Accounting Technicians Experienced a 29% Lift in Open and Click Through Rates with Return Path Certification

Industry: Membership Organizations/ Education

Product: Return Path Certification

Challenge

The Association of Accounting Technicians (AAT) is one of the world’s leading membership organisations for accounting professionals, with over 100,000 members in 80 countries. AAT operates a wide-ranging email marketing program that distributes a mix of promotional and transactional email in the form of email newsletters, exam results, membership renewals, branch events and general membership information.

Despite the fact that their list contained 100% permission based emails and response rates were good; they were not achieving optimum deliverability to their core domains. Realizing the opportunity to improve their overall email performance, AAT turned to leading UK based email service provider, Database Group Interactive (DbGi), to help them improve deliverability and thus increase opens and clicks.

Solution

Since AAT is a member based program, they are able to maintain a high quality list and keep subscriber complaints low. This in combination with their good reputation and email performance made them a prime candidate for Return Path Certification.

AAT was accepted as a Certified sender in October 2008 which soon provided them with the following benefits:

• Improved email deliverability to 2 billion inboxes including Yahoo! Mail and Windows Live Hotmail enhanced delivery to their worldwide membership base of over 100,000 members.
• Automatic link and image enablement at Hotmail helped them immediately solve rendering issues and focus on optimizing their emails for better performance.
• Reduced throttling at Hotmail provided more sending flexibility without limitation to the number of emails sent and when.

Daily performance reporting kept them informed of potential reputation problems so they could maintain their good standing in the program for the long term.

Results

Within three months of being a Certified sender, AAT experienced a significant lift to their response rates. Average open rates increased by 29.9% and the average click-through rate increased to 29.3%.

Customer Feedback

“AAT has effectively achieved an improvement of almost a third in the performance of its email marketing program without having to make any significant increase in marketing budget or resources. We are very pleased with the 29% lift in response achieved with Return Path Certification and view DbGi’s pro-activeness as a crucial element in the ongoing development of our email programs.”

- Alison Dudding
Marketing Manager, Association of Accounting Technician