Improving deliverability of campaigns

Audiens is a Shopify app dedicated to helping small and medium-sized businesses segment their email marketing campaigns with speed and ease, using data and AI.

Team: 1 Product Designer, 2 Software Developers

Improve the deliverability rate of users’ email campaigns, while maintaining our standards of an anti-spam approach.

We discovered that users’ campaigns were often being received by very few recipients, compromising our customer’s trust in our suggested send times and was the antithesis of our company’s mission.

I conducted weekly user interviews to understand the problems our customers were facing.

• Users feared spamming their customers and ruining relationships
• They felt time poor, and struggled to find time for email segmentation
• Segmentation could take up to 30 minutes
• Users were flexible as to when they schedule campaigns
• The success of a campaign was driven by revenue generated

If our campaigns don’t reach the intended segment, the subsequent revenue will be low and we’d offer little value to our users.

Orchestrating multiple campaigns can be difficult, so Audiens suggests a time to send campaigns. However, it didn’t account for other campaigns scheduled, leading to low levels of deliverability.

By ingesting the shop’s campaign schedule, we could calculate a send time optimised for deliverability, open and click through rate.

Audiens now displays ‘Times to avoid’, the expected number of recipients and the best send times.

Users require freedom of control as to when they send campaigns, but this often led to clashing campaigns.

We now warn users when a campaign is due to reach few recipients, showing how many recipients are expected. The user can then make a judgement call, whether to continue as planned or reschedule with a single click.

Finally, if a campaign has still managed to slip through the net and resulted in low recipients, we indicate this using an icon.

This allows us to inform the user when something may have gone wrong and how to correct this next time. We will be introducing a replay feature, that will resend the campaign to those who should have received it.

The changes improved the orchestration of campaigns considerably. Not only had we reduced the time needed for email segmentation, we had also improved the results of doing so.

Users reported saving hours in creating campaigns each week, while reaching more customers, with deliverability increasing from 91% to over 99%.