How Overstock’s e-mail skips around spam at Yahoo
The increased volume of e-mails around the holidays isn`t just retailers looking to connect with their customers of record – the season keeps spammers busy with pitches as well, which can hinder retailers trying to deliver e-mail to customers who have requested it. Retailer Overstock.com Inc. was able to reverse a 9% decline in its subscribed e-mail deliverability and return its delivery rate to 100% during the last holiday season with the input of e-mail services provider Return Path Inc., the company reports.
Overstock.com’s subscribed e-mail had reached an average deliverability rate of 98% to 100% after the company had worked with Return Path’s technology and consulting services for several months earlier in the year. But with the holiday shopping season, average deliverability dropped to 92% among Overstock e-mail subscribers using Yahoo as their Internet service provider. Return Path consultants uncovered the reason: high volumes of spam into the Yahoo system were flooding the system and causing it to divert e-mail it normally would accept.
Return Path advised Overstock on a course of action that would allow it to send its e-mail to Yahoo without tripping Yahoo’s volume filters. Some ISP mail servers limit the number of individual conversations, or connections, that they will allow from a single sending server, how long they will let that conversation continue and how many messages they will allow to be transmitted during that conversation, explains George Bilbrey, general manager of Return Path’s e-mail management service, Sender Score. Return Path`s recommended fixes, based on information supplied by Yahoo, were that Overstock limit the number of messages per connection and the number of concurrent messages it was sending.
“The change was instantaneous,” reports Ryan Hoffman, e-commerce marketing manager at Overstock. “We implemented the fixes Return Path suggested and were back to 100% deliverability at Yahoo overnight.”
Hoffman notes that because Yahoo is one of the largest domains in Overstock’s e-mail subscriber list, a 9% drop in e-mail deliverability represents a critical difference in revenue, particularly during November and December. “The rapid response of the Return Path team mitigated the damage to the program and got us back on track quickly,” he adds.
Overstock.com is No. 25 in the Internet Retailer Top 500 Guide.
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