Scour.com is a social networking search engine that provides a platform for users to vote and comment on relevancy. Searchers connect with one another creating a true social search community, attained through innovative solutions to meet the needs of today’s web searchers.
Scour.com uses emails to send invitations, welcome messages, newsletters and reminder messages to their user base. When Scour first came to Return Path, they discovered that more than 23% of their emails were getting blocked at their key ISPs, namely Hotmail, MSN, Yahoo! and many smaller ISPs that made up a significant portion of their list.
Despite being a new social network, they grew rapidly, winning awards and high accolades from many publications including the New York Times and Los Angeles Times. With the rapid expansion came the need to send more email on behalf of their member base. On average, Scour sent 1.7 million messages per day. However, being new to the email universe, Scour did not have a solid email sending reputation. As a result, their Sender Score remained at 70 or below, causing ISPs and other receivers to block their mailstreams.
Scour initially signed on for Return Path Gold service with a goal of joining the Return Path Certification program, the industry’s largest and most respected whitelist, granting VIP access to over 1.3 billion inboxes. Return Path helped Scour implement a 3 month plan that included key recommendations that would improve Scour’s email reputation and make them eligible to apply for certification. By accessing Return Path’s deliverability monitoring tools, Scour gained instant visibility into the inbox and could therefore, easily identify issues negatively affecting their reputation.
First, Return Path advised Scour to reduce the volume of messages sent per day. ISPs use sending history to evaluate mail. Since Scour’s dedicated IP addresses were new with no sending reputation, ISPs didn’t have any historical data by which to evaluate their mail and therefore, blocked it at the gate. Return Path recommended that Scour start by sending 20,000 messages per day then slowly increase the volume of messages each day until they reached their targeted level of 1.7 million messages per day. By “warming up” their IPs they would systematically build a solid sending reputation.
Next, Return Path examined Scour’s list hygiene practices and found a high unknown user rate averaging 13%. Unknown user rate is a key reputation metric used by ISPs to evaluate mail and is used to qualify senders for the Return Path Certification program. Social networks are at higher risk because address book importing makes it difficult to control the number of bad addresses that are uploaded to their database. To combat this problem, Return Path recommended that Scour limit the number of address book uploads per user and explore strategies to increase subscriber engagement.
Additionally, Return Path helped Scour sign up for feedback loops so they could monitor the number of complaints recorded by various ISPs. Since every ISP has their own threshold for acceptance, Scour used Return Path’s deliverability monitoring suite to easily monitor complaint rates for each of their IP addresses so they could proactively remove complainers and fix problems before they adversely affected their reputation.
Once Scour implemented Return Path’s recommendations, they were able to reduce their complaint and unknown user rates to under 2% and 10% respectively, earning them an overall delivery rate of 85%. Moreover, they became eligible to apply for Return Path Certification. Once accepted, they experienced 100% delivery rates at Yahoo!, Hotmail, MSN, Cox, AT&T, Bellsouth, Cablevision, and hundreds of other ISPs covered by the Return Path Certification program. Scour continues to use Return Path’s deliverability monitoring suite to manage their email deliverability and reputation and to ensure their premium status in the Return Path Certification program.
“Before we first signed on with Return Path we knew we had delivery problems, but didn’t have the data to support our assumptions, nor did we know how to resolve them. By becoming a Return Path client we received detailed reports and expert advice along with a step-by-step action plan that was easy to follow and included our goal of attaining Return Path Certification. Now we have increased our overall inbox placement rates by improving our email practices and have achieved 100% delivery to Hotmail, MSN, Yahoo! and hundreds of key ISPs as a member of the Return Path Certification program. Our search is now over. We now have a solid relationship with Return Path and actively use their tools and services to keep our inbox delivery high and create great subscriber experiences.”
—Alex Scoble, Scour Product Manager
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