Leading Healthcare Services Provider Increases
Deliverability to 97% by Getting Rid of Complainers

Industry: Healthcare Services

Product: Return Path Platinum

Challenge

A leading health services provider relies on promoting their message to their database of returning and potential customers. As of September 2007, this health services provider was experiencing delivery issues despite the use of a permissioned list. According to Return Path’s baseline report, their delivery rates hovered between 75-80%, with approximately 10% of emails being routed to the bulk folder and another 10% missing.

Solution

To help them solve their delivery issues, Return Path consultants reviewed their email practices including analyzing their reputation, monitoring their delivery rates at each ISP, and reviewing their email capture practices in order to understand the cause of their failed delivery to the inbox. Upon completion of the review, Return Path discovered that the delivery problems were the result of high complaint rates, indicating the need to implement feedback loops and investigate their email collection practices.

First, Return Path helped them sign up for all feedback loops offered by ISPs. Feedback loops provide marketers with a list of subscribers who have complained, so they can proactively remove them from their mailing list.

Next, Return Path took a look at their email collection process. What they found was that when customers registered to receive a free information kit, they were unaware of what types of other email offers they would receive in addition to the information kit they requested. A simple change to their disclosure language now clearly lets new registrants know that they can also expect to receive news, updates and other offers by email.

Consequently, this client revamped their unsubscribe practices to ensure that all emails contained a working unsubscribe mechanism that was easy to locate within the email. Without a clearly visible unsubscribe link, subscribers were driven to use the “this is spam” button to remove themselves from the list. This subsequently caused ISPs to block their mailstreams. By changing their disclosure language and adding the appropriate unsubscribe links to emails, spam complaints were significantly reduced.

Results

By signing up for feedback loops and following the recommended email best practices for their subscribe and unsubscribe process, this well known health services provider was able to reduce complaints and improve its email sending reputation with ISPs. This resulted in an increase of their overall deliverability by 21% to an impressive 97%.

As a result of their improved email sending reputation, they applied and were accepted to the Return Path Certification program as a Certified sender - the industry's largest and most widely used whitelist. As a member of the program they now anticipate additional deliverability protection for the more than 2 billion email inboxes covered by Return Path Certification.

Customer Feedback

"Until we talked to Return Path we had no idea how negatively our email collection practices were affecting our deliverability and impacting our subscriber experience. With a few simple changes, we were able to significantly reduce complaints and improve our reputation with ISPs. As a result, we have achieved close to 100% deliverability and have the opportunity to receive white glove treatment through the Return Path Certification program – a big win for an organization that relies heavily on email to communicate our value and build relationships with our subscribers."

—Manager, Consumer Marketing, Product & Channel