Communicator Corporation is an ESP with a different approach to email delivery. Unlike other ESPs, they allow each client to take ownership of their deliverability, which helps clients understand and appreciate that delivery is not just something for which their ESP is responsible. Rather, delivery is a result of proper data hygiene and depends upon how and where the data is collected and segmented. We talk about data hygiene with clients regularly. Poor data hygiene is the number one reason that legitimate, permission based marketing ends up in the junk folder. That said, the quality and the relevancy of an email campaign correlates directly with stellar deliverability and, ultimately, the responsiveness of the list itself.

Communicator Corporation’s decision to install PowerMTA not only allowed greater flexibility and control of outbound mail queues, but also the capacity to manage inbound streams, bounce processing, and secure email relaying for transactional pattern streams PowerMTA’s ability to identify delivery issues in real-time by alerting senders and showing the source of the problem helped the decision making process.

Challenges

Before Communicator Corporation began using PowerMTA, they lacked sufficient information to optimize delivery. They had little visibility into what was being delivered, and more importantly, lacked insight into what was not happening and why. Deliverability could not be granularly measured, which has become a significant metric for marketing professionals.

Additionally, the ability to scale was a problem. Mail servers choked or bottlenecked when queues became too large. As these inefficiencies mushroomed, it created a workflow challenge. When you are sending 1.2M messages per hour, per server, having any sort of downtime diminishes productivity and rattles customer confidence. And, purchasing additional servers to handle increased volume was not the answer. Communicator Corporation needed sophisticated software that would easily scale, reduce the number of servers being used, and manage increased volume more easily and efficiently.

Without the benefits of a commercial MTA, Communicator Corporation had resorted to managing all email queues without the ability to prioritize them. For example, a large email campaign could not be prioritized against the “five” small test campaigns, which meant the test campaigns, had the same priority as the marketing message. With PowerMTA’s queue prioritization, this is not a problem. The feature allows both prioritization of queues
(like test emails vs. marketing campaigns) and granular measurement.

Actions

Purchasing PowerMTA was a conscious business decision with many competitive advantages. Besides scalability and performance, for which PowerMTA is universally renowned, it provided deliverability insight and intelligence to asynchronous queue management, as well as the ability to customize and recalibrate the configuration for optimal sending patterns or business requirements.

Rather than requiring businesses to shift requirements and resources to fit the MTA capabilities, PowerMTA revolves around current and future business requirements.

A Customer’s Point of View

Steve Henderson of Communicator Corporation had this praise for PowerMTA and the affect it has had on his company:

“We provide our clients with the information, the expertise, the support and the technology to help clients reach and maintain the highest delivery rates possible. And to do that, we rely on PowerMTA. The Communicator Intelligent Delivery Solution (IDS) uses hundreds of IP addresses across different IP ranges, automatically responding to ISP/IEP policy changes, based on sending rates of statistical analysis or previous campaigns, protecting and/or preserving delivery reputation, while at the same time allowing for the quickest inbox placement rates possible.

The Communicator Response Engine shows which mailing lists are generating a good or bad reputation and why—which segments of the data are more responsive than others and why. All of this relies on the sophistication and agility of PowerMTA. PowerMTA is integrated into our unique delivery-focused approach to email messaging. PowerMTA allows the delivery team to respond to delivery issues in real-time, provides our clients with the qualitative and quantitative information they need to make better business decisions and provides Communicator Corporation the power and flexibility to keep our promise of delivery beyond expectation.”