Travel Leaders Network— a marketing and technology services provider for travel agencies, leisure and business travelers, and wholly owned brands who sell travel — wanted to increase their email campaign success rate through improved deliverability. They also aimed to implement proactive email strategies and database management to prevent future deliverability risks, ensuring they had the necessary tools and support to address emerging issues.

In the past, the company has worked through mitigating issues on their own. But managing several brands, along with new sending requirements from various ISPs, including Gmail and Yahoo, Travel Leaders Network sought additional insights, tools, and expertise to supplement in-house resources and improve deliverability.

COVID hit the travel industry hard, disrupting Travel Leaders Network’s email frequency and their active list size. While aggregate numbers looked good as well as their reputation score, opens, clicks, and email delivery rate, after taking a closer look, they noticed deliverability issues with some major ISPs. Travel Leaders Network attempted to handle issues without support from Acoustic.

Lisa Vongphachanh, Email Marketing Manager, Travel Leaders Network, said, “Prior to engaging with the Acoustic professional services team, COVID had shut down many aspects of the travel industry, which in turn affected the email campaigns impacting the frequency of emails being sent and the list of active contacts. After ramping efforts back up to pre-COVID levels, we became aware of deliverability issues and wanted to improve engagement.” 

She added, “With email deliverability, it has always been hard as an email marketer to stay in the know of the best practices and how to implement them when various business goals come into play.”

With the goal of increasing email deliverability and getting ahead of issues before they arise, “We opted to bring in Acoustic to learn the root cause of some of the deliverability issues with the hopes that their expert findings would allow us to create internal standards specifically tailored to our unique use cases.”

Travel Leaders Network chose to take advantage of the Deliverability offering to collaborate with Acoustic consultants, investigate the issues further, and work towards optimizing email deliverability and overall engagement. The professional services engagement started in August 2023.

Lisa says, “One item that was helpful to leverage from Acoustic is the relationship with the ISPs.” The Deliverability engagement with Acoustic professional services is recurring with multiple touchpoints that include: Sending Infrastructure Review, Deliverability Reporting and Sending Audit, and Strategic Sending Practice Review resulting in a Recommendations and Monitor phase intended to improve email deliverability.

As part of the engagement, Travel Leaders Network receives access to inbox monitoring features, blocklist monitoring and spam trap analysis tools, deliverability dashboards (reputation, blocklist and spam trap reporting, in addition to customized best practices and a course of action to build and maintain email reputation.

With Acoustic’s expert guidance, Travel Leaders Network is working to reduce bounces and spam traps and improve inbox placement and sender reputation. Deliverability results are proactively checked on a weekly, monthly, and quarterly basis to monitor for any issues or areas of concern.

Travel Leaders Network has seen a more than 700% increase in engagement across two of their brands, a nearly 100% bounce rate reduction, and a greater than 50% increase in send rates. As a result of their work with the Acoustic professional services team, they’ve changed their sending practices to reduce deliverability risk by enhancing audience selection and identifying warning signs affecting deliverability. The multi-touch approach allows Travel Leaders Network to proactively address these warnings before they escalate into larger issues.

Lisa explained, “We’re not just looking at open rate. We look at the number of spam traps, email metrics by top domain, including inbox placement rate, bounces, and blocklist trends. We’re able to look at everything that’s going on with each email send. We’re doing all we can to keep our lists clean and only send to active subscribers. There’s a lot of different pieces to the deliverability puzzle that will never go away. We’ll be continuously working at it.”

She added, “We are happy to report we see a high level of engagement due to increased deliverability. We have changed some of the standard operations for maintaining databases for some of the brands, we are utilizing new reporting metrics, and we are more confident in our overall practices. Acoustic’s deliverability expertise, relationships with ISPs, and investment of time to analyze our data has been extremely beneficial to the success of our email campaigns.”