What should be the last thing a marketer should have to worry about when designing and building a portfolio of rich messages and orchestrating them for ideal delivery?  The uptime of their message service provider. It’s 2020 and, sadly, not all companies plan for near 100% uptime. Uptime and reliability for message delivery is an assumed quality that every vendor has, until it’s not there and your Black Friday, Holiday or Limited Time offers are either delayed or not delivered.

MARCH 31 UPDATE

As we enter another week where the world is mostly under shelter-in-place orders due to COVID-19, we’re continuing to monitor delivery and engagement rates for email marketing sends. We wanted to know:

• How are brands communicating with users during the crisis?
• Are users more likely to interact with mailings now that many are sheltering in place?
• Are users more likely to unsubscribe from mailings?

Email continues to be a critical tool for enterprise brands during these uncertain times. For most industries, consumers are clicking and buying, and even in sectors like travel and hospitality where marketing has essentially been paused, email will be one of the most important channels in getting things ramped back up.

For Super Senders that have considered moving to a modern data infrastructure, the biggest hurdle is often the bottom line for basically every business: cost. No matter how much benefit the Marketing team sees from having better data access, if it can’t be directly tied to revenue and a tangible ROI, it’s liable to be passed over for more pressing needs.

Because we’re believers in the immense power of a modern data infrastructure to revolutionize the way marketers use their data, though, we decided to partner up with MarTech Review and LumenData to do a close examination of the costs and savings associated with this sort of investment in order to develop a research-based ROI model so that companies can go into the decision-making process more confidently because they have better information.

A few weeks ago, we shared our research on different types of bounces and their implications for senders. One of our most notable findings pertained to Mailbox Full bounces — specifically, that almost ⅓ of recipients with a Mailbox Full bounce opened another message within the next 12 months.

The surprising results sparked conversation in the industry, with senders and providers debating how to handle Mailbox Full bounces in light of the data. Rumors have also been swirling of Gmail making changes to the way they handle Mailbox Full bounces, so we thought a deeper analysis of the results by ISP was in order.

There may be no industry in which personally relevant cross-channel communication is more of an imperative today than travel and hospitality. There are so many factors at play when it comes to messaging outreach, from timing to customer behavior, and so much fierce competition in the space that generic blasts have virtually no chance of breaking through the noise.