Ding is the #1 international top-up network for mobile phones. It delivers a top-up every second of every day, helping families and friends around the world stay connected. The company has been keeping people connected since 2006, when it launched the first-ever service of its kind to help people send top-ups to their loved ones back home and today connects over 4 billion phones through 400+ operators in more than 130 countries. The company is headquartered in Dublin, Ireland, and has regional offices in Miami, Dubai, Barcelona, San Salvador, Bucharest, Dhaka and France.

Email is the company’s largest communication channel for returning customers, with nearly 7 figures sent on a weekly basis. These include promotional emails from third parties, welcome emails for new subscribers, and incentive emails to retain subscribers that are in danger of lapsing.

Wanting to increase the number of returning customers each month and migrate existing customers from the website to the app, Ding needed the ability to utilise email marketing programme data to assess the company’s inbox placement and spam scores, and optimise its marketing campaigns accordingly.

The company chose Return Path’s Inbox Monitor solution which generated data that enabled Ding to significantly increase its open and click rates, and reduce it’s Gmail spam rate to almost zero.

CHALLENGE

The company relied heavily on the success of its email marketing campaign to win new, and migrate existing, customers to the Ding app, however it had little to no visibility of how the programme was performing. Email amounts to a significant percent of Ding’s total revenue, so it was crucial that its campaigns were fresh, communicative, and engaging.

With access to basic metrics, the company was aware that it had low inbox placement and high spam scores—specifically with Gmail inboxes—but had no further understanding of its email deliverability. In fact, 64% of Gmail emails were being sent straight to subscribers’ spam folders.

The company needed a solution that would provide actionable data and deliver full insight into its email campaigns so that it could identify what was working and what wasn’t. The aim was to subsequently take action to maximize inbox placement with Gmail and every other key mailbox provider.

Email is the company’s largest communication channel for returning customers, with nearly 7 figures sent on a weekly basis.

SOLUTION

Ding selected Return Path’s products and services, including Inbox Monitor, to improve the company’s reputation with mailbox providers and provide visibility into email performance. The Return Path Platform offers an innovative, intuitive, and streamlined email performance experience. Its unique data helped Ding quickly and efficiently diagnose and solve important deliverability issues.

With the company’s data incorporated into a single platform, it could see the at-a-glance information most important for its email programme. The company was able to utilise actionable information and insights into its email programme’s sending reputation and the metrics mailbox providers use to determine if you get to the inbox.

Armed with this data, Ding began to segment its users based on how engaged a customer was, this was taken from historical data within their internal DWH. This combined with macro deliverability metrics provided by Return Path, Ding could quickly understand what portions of their userbase would be advantageous to communicate and to ensure mail box providers saw high engagements and low complaints when looking at Ding’s IP and domain. This slowly raised the base level of email deliverability and thus allowed Ding to communicate offers and information to its users.

The data generated by the Return Path Platform allowed Ding to easily differentiate its delivered messages and provide the company with a comprehensive look into what percentage of its mail was going to the inbox, the spam folder, or was being blocked at major mailbox providers around the world. The platform utilizes Return Path Consumer Network data, which consists of 2.5 million email users, to show placement from real subscriber data.

With Return Path’s inbox monitoring solution, Ding was able to gain more visibility into its deliverability at mailbox providers across the globe, including Gmail.

The company chose Return Path’s inbox monitoring solution which generated data that enabled Ding to significantly increase its open and click rates, and reduce it’s Gmail spam rate to almost zero.

Ding selected the Return Path Platform to improve the company’s reputation with mailbox providers and provide visibility into email performance.

Utilizing this information, Ding began to segment customers based on mail box provider and targeted highly engaged customers when inbox placement was dipping for a specific mail box. When inbox placement was high, Ding opened the restrictions on their segmentation to allow more customers fall into the top end of their email funnel. Through iterative testing, Ding found the optimal restrictions and frequency for a user’s email lifecycle.

“Return Path has given us the insights we needed to optimize our email strategy. We have been able to rectify our segmentation and understand the importance of maintaining list hygiene with best practices, which has seen the performance of our email campaign improve significantly. We are particularly impressed with the Gmail spam placement being reduced. In fact, in terms of email revenue, this has had the biggest impact on our bottom line. Since using Return Path, we have had the insight we desperately needed to ensure our campaigns were doing what we wanted them to—attract, win and keep customers.”

Ellouise Hogan
Head of CRM and Web Projects

RESULTS

The data Return Path’s tools and services have generated have given Ding full and immediate visibility into inbox placement, helping the company determine what type of content and segmentation generates the highest engagement levels. Ding noticed an increase in its email engagement after a couple of months with Return Path – from a baseline of 23% to 37% in open rate, and from 25% to 48% in click rates. Additionally, Gmail inbox placement increased from 36% to 98.7%. The email program improved exponentially after incorporating Return Path dashboard’s information into our email marketing decision. The bottom line of email revenue increased 321% when taking an average of the next 8 months after incorporating Return Path. This led to email contribution to total revenue increase by 4.2% percentage points in the same time period.

Ellouise Hogan, head of CRM and Web Projects at Ding said: “Return Path has given us the insights we needed to optimise our email strategy. We have been able to rectify our segmentation and understand the importance of maintaining list hygiene with best practices, which has seen the performance of our email campaign improve significantly. We are particularly impressed with the Gmail spam placement being reduced. In fact, in terms of email revenue, this has had the biggest impact on our bottom line. Since using Return Path, we have had the insight we desperately needed to ensure our campaigns were doing what we wanted them to—attract, win and keep customers.”