Industry: Travel

Products: RP Certification

Dealchecker.co.uk is one of the UK's top five travel comparison sites. Its free online service lets consumers search for the best flight, hotel, holiday package, and car hire deals, compare prices, and then book direct. Since its launch in 2005, it has built up a subscriber base of over one million people who receive Dealchecker's weekly Real Deals newsletter containing its top 10 offers of that week.

Challenge

Dealchecker is a 100 per cent online business and sends out five million emails a month through its leading online marketing solutions provider Experian CheetahMail (CheetahMail). However, with email an extremely popular marketing channel among brands, inboxes are crowded and consumers are rightly choosy about what they allow into their inbox, and what they reject as junk.

Tests showed that while the vast majority of Dealchecker's emails – 74 per cent – were being delivered to the inbox successfully, 12 per cent were going to spam folders and an additional 14 per cent were blocked or going missing altogether. With email critical to its business success, Dealchecker wanted to ensure it was doing everything possible to improve inbox placement and gain maximum deliverability, and sought a way of proving to ISPs that it was a responsible email sender.

Solution

Through its technology partner CheetahMail, Dealchecker applied to join the Return Path Certification programme, the largest and broadest whitelist programme in the email universe, covering over 2 billion mailboxes worldwide. ISPs use this list to help them identify the best senders of email and filter out unwanted spam, allowing the good emails to go through to the inbox and making it a list brands want to be on.

To be accepted on to the programme, businesses have to prove that they will adhere to Return Path's stringent standards, and once certified, must continue to meet a rigorous set of performance-based metrics that include very low complaintand unknown user rates.

CheetahMail worked closely with Dealchecker building a strong foundation that would enable them to progress seamlessly through the certification process and be in the best possible position once certified. This was achieved through a combination of key projects, including the move to a private IP network and a tactical IP warming plan.

Over a period of three months, Dealchecker's Inbox Placement Rates were measured using Return Path's email monitoring tool - Mailbox Monitor - which provided a deep analysis of where their emails were going. For each ISP, Mailbox Monitor records the percentage of email delivered into the inbox, as well as the bulk and the missing folders, and can also reveal the Sender Score, complaint rate, unknown user rate, and whether the campaign and IP passed each of several key infrastructure and authentication checks. As a responsible email sender, Dealchecker was thereafter accepted onto the Certification programme.

Results

On a 30-day comparison, Dealchecker saw 21.9 per cent more emails delivered to the inbox, with a corresponding decrease in the volume that ended up as bulk or missing. In fact, over the same period, 11.6 per cent less went to bulk and 10.2 per cent less went missing. Dealchecker also experienced an impressive 24 per cent more opens and 25 per cent more clicks. With an Inbox Placement Rate of 96 per cent, Dealchecker is well above the 86.5 per cent UK benchmark senders are currently experiencing, based on Return Path's 2010 European Email Deliverability Benchmark Report.

Becoming a Return Path Certified sender has enabled the travel comparison site to improve how it is seen by leading ISPs while also providing better tracking, with the direct result of more emails going to the actual inbox.

Client Testimonial

"There are new deals happening every hour of every day in the online travel market and our email newsletter is at the centre of our efforts to provide our subscribers with the latest travel opportunities. If our emails don't arrive, our customers don't get the information they need and want, making strong and consistent inbox placement a top priority for us. This is why we applied for the Return Path Certification whitelist. Since our acceptance to the whitelist, we have experienced a significant 21.9 per cent increase in inbox deliverability as well as a significant increase in opens and clicks."

– Alex Saint, CEO, Dealchecker.co.uk