Cleanliness is Next to Godliness
for BYU Bookstore
The Background
From its humble beginnings in 1906 as the Students’ Supply Association to its modern day incarnation as the Brigham Young University (BYU) Bookstore, the Bookstore has served the needs of the campus community and beyond. The BYU Bookstore is also a worldwide source for Latter-day Saints (LDS) books, gifts, and other merchandise. As a result, its online business is critically important for serving its world-wide constituents and, in turn, generates significant revenue for the Bookstore.
The Problem
Steve Lawyer, e-Commerce Supervisor at BYU Bookstore, was concerned about his email deliverability due to two related problems. The first was that the Bookstore’s email list dated as far back as 2002, resulting in a large number of bouncing and inactive email addresses. The Bookstore’s staff did not have the expertise to clean its list or to maintain its freshness going forward. This affected its email deliverability and, as a direct result, impeded sales. Second, the Bookstore’s ESP had refused to message the list again due to its high bounce rate and recommended that the list be cleaned before any further campaigns were run.
During the vendor research process, Lawyer noticed great variations in price, service offerings, and descriptions of the work itself between one provider to another.
“FreshAddress’s website offered clear explanations of what to expect for each level of hygiene services and its sales consultants articulated in-depth solutions for the Bookstore’s deliverability challenges. Additionally, our ESP recommended FreshAddress as an experienced and reliable list hygiene services provider."
--- Steve Lawyer, e-Commerce Supervisor
The Solution
Lawyer decided to utilize FreshAddress’s Email Audit service to identify and purge the bad email addresses on his file. FreshAddress’s proprietary email services were able to not only flag invalid email addresses for removal but also to identify suspect and malicious addresses, complainers, and possible spamtraps. This helped the Bookstore maximize its email deliverability and response rates as well as reduce the marketing costs associated with bouncing emails.
Results and Benefits
FreshAddress’s service flagged approximately 6% of the email addresses as undeliverable or problematic (e.g. spamtraps, closed domains, suspect or malicious, etc). By removing these email addresses from its file, the Bookstore now could avoid being blacklisted by ISPs, which track bounce rates, spam complaint rates, and spam traps to determine whether or not to block or blacklist a sender’s emails.
“Since we cleaned our list with FreshAddress, we have experienced drastically increased open rates. Our open rates used to be 5 – 7% and now we get 15 – 20% consistently and 50 – 60% for smaller, targeted campaigns!”
--- Steve Lawyer, e-Commerce Supervisor
As a result of this experience, the BYU Bookstore e-Commerce team gained insight into the importance of list quality services. Previously, their primary concern had been the overall list size because they incorrectly perceived list size –- the larger, the better -- as a barometer of success in email marketing. Once they increased their deliverability rates, open rates, and sales, their priorities changed and data quality is now paramount.
“The reality is that a clean list is far more productive than a large one. After all, the first step to email marketing success is to get your email into the inbox! After going through this learning process with FreshAddress, we smile now as opt-outs come in and bounces are removed from the list. Our new motto is “The cleaner and leaner our list, the faster we reach our goals.”
Cleaning our list with FreshAddress was like a breath of fresh air. They patiently explained the details of the process, answered all our questions, and were always prompt, whether returning calls or responding to emails. And once we said “go,” every step of the project was completed seamlessly and delivered even earlier than promised!”
--- Steve Lawyer, e-Commerce Supervisor