WhichBingo boosts overall email deliverability with Adestra’s support

Brand

WhichBingo is the UK’s leading Bingo comparison site. The company also produces an annual industry report and holds a high-profile award ceremony in London each year.

Objectives

• Improve inbox placement and deliverability.
• Reduce bounces, blocks and spam rating.

The Challenge

WhichBingo has a deep pool of marketing content to promote the companies they work with. However, due to the nature of the industry it operates in (gaming and gambling), the copy used runs a high risk of being blocked by spam filters. This, coupled with historical bad practices, has led to poor deliverability rates and low subscriber engagement. Prior to moving to Adestra, WhichBingo’s inbox placement would peak at around 40%.

The Solution

After taking a course in email marketing best practice, WhichBingo’s Sales and Advertising Manager requested a deliverability audit from Adestra. Having a reliable and knowledgeable partner in this process was crucial to make sure that they improved deliverability and maintained it for the future. The audit and the suggested steps triggered a series of changes in the company’s approach to email marketing which worked together to improve results.

Email structure changes:

• Reviewing the use of sensitive copy – for example, replacing ‘free’ in the subject lines and body copy with ‘complimentary’ and swapping characters such as £ and % with their word equivalent (‘pounds’ and ‘percent’).
• Improved domain management for sender details, images and template hosting.
• Optimizing subject lines, text-to-image ratio, image alt text and send times.
• Changed the IP address.
• Refrain from using URLs as display text.
• Switched to multi-offer campaigns to increase the chance of a subscriber clicking-through which indicates to spam filters that the message is valuable to subscribers, which helps to increase inbox placement.
• Changed the call-to-action button copy to reflect the action the subscriber will take and placed it above the fold.

Data management changes:

• Introduced SPF and DKIM validation
• Segmented lists to target engaged users, gradually increasing the list size as campaigns became more successful
• Separated the unsubscribe link in the footers from the preference center
• Monitoring and removing invalid email addresses after each send

The Result

After working closely with Adestra to address past delivery challenges and mitigate potential future issues, WhichBingo has experienced fantastic improvements:

• reduced spam rating from 3.1 to 0
• reduced bounces from as much as 969 per month to 5-10
• reduced number of average blocks per email from 252 to 0.3
• increased deliverability from between 7 – 40% to 89% – 96%

Since then [i.e. the audit] I have been working very closely with Adestra to address a variety of issues and get their recommendations. What’s more, I have now become an avid reader of the blogs they post on their own website and watch their regular webinars too – both are a great source of ‘best practice’ tips and a look at future practice.
– Mark Wilson Smith, Sales and Advertising Manager at WhichBingo

What are they planning next?

WhichBingo is looking to implement new template designs which will make emails more attractive across devices, thus encouraging more opens and clicks. This will have a knock-on effect on deliverability and the brand’s sender reputation and it will enable the team to easily incorporate split-testing into their day-to-day activities.

With email engagement rates on the rise, the company is slowly increasing list size in their newsletters to increase their reach thanks to better inbox placement. The next step will be to use segmentation to further increase engagement based on observed and given preferences.

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