BrandAlley Reaches an Additional 100M Inboxes Per Year with Validity Sender Certification.
The Highlights:
99
Sender Score
99.7%
Inbox placement rate
100M
Additional emails to inboxes each year
The challenge:
Maintaining strong deliverability
and avoiding spam filters as a high-volume,
high-frequency sender.
BrandAlley is an online fashion retailer based in the United Kingdom.
The company (which also has a strong presence in France) runs regular flash sales across its designer brands, launching multiple sales each day which typically last for a week at a time. Given the time sensitivity of these campaigns, email is the ideal channel for BrandAlley to communicate with its customers.
“BrandAlley is, without doubt, an ‘email-first business,’” said Michelle Hurney, Head of Marketing at BrandAlley. “Our customers are highly engaged—some of them are already shopping at four in the morning! If they don’t receive their morning email, they’ll contact customer service to find out where it is.”
Given the enthusiasm of BrandAlley’s subscriber base, it’s perhaps unsurprising that the company attributes an impressive 50 percent of its revenue to the email channel.
With this much revenue at stake, BrandAlley can’t afford to turn a blind eye toward its email deliverability—its ability to reach subscribers’ inboxes instead of being blocked or filtered to spam folders.
BrandAlley sends high volumes of email—almost two billion emails per year—which makes achieving strong deliverability more challenging. The company sends at least two emails per day to its active subscriber base—a morning email summarizing what’s featured on the site that day and an afternoon email curating items the customer has browsed recently.
“People hear that we sent two emails per day and think ‘that’s way too much!’” said Hurney. “But it’s a tactic that resonates with our customers. The challenge is making sure that we’re constantly testing and optimizing our emails and their content to guarantee what we’re getting in front of customers is resonating.”
High-volume senders are often penalized with stricter filtering by major mailbox providers like Gmail, Yahoo, AOL, and Microsoft, especially during peak sales season. Prior to working with Validity, BrandAlley’s marketing team often suffered notable declines in inbox placement during peak sending periods like the holiday season.
The solution:
A long-term partnership with Validity, including the Everest email deliverability platform,
Sender Certification, and expert support.
To overcome these challenges, BrandAlley turned to Validity, the leading provider of email success and data quality solutions.
After implementing Everest, BrandAlley used the platform’s email performance dashboards to monitor their campaigns in real time and detect any engagement dips early.
“Every morning, we receive a scheduled report, summarizing our deliverability performance across our various IPs, so we can keep a close eye on performance,” Hurney explained. “It’s a real peace-of-mind factor.”
Of Everest’s various modules, BrandAlley considers Design and Content a particular favorite. As the company sends large, image-heavy emails, Design and Content gives them confidence that each email will render exactly as expected across every device and major mailbox provider.
Due to their reliance on the email channel, BrandAlley also pursued Validity’s Sender Certification program. This program essentially provided an “insurance policy” that helped BrandAlley prevent email deliverability threats and reduce how often their emails were filtered to spam or throttled by mailbox providers. After completing this program, BrandAlley gained priority status with leading mailbox providers and spam filtering vendors worldwide.
BrandAlley also leans closely on their dedicated Customer Success Manager to anticipate and triage any issues that might undermine their email performance. “We view our Customer Success Manager as an extension of our team,” said Hurney. “We hardly need to think about managing our deliverability because she is always on top of it.”
The partnership with Validity has been critical as BrandAlley navigates changes to its email infrastructure. Last year, BrandAlley completed a notable acquisition with Internet Fusion Group and has recently integrated the French arm of the business—BrandAlley France—onto their ESP. Both transitions required careful monitoring of IP and domain reputation to prevent any deliverability issues. “There was no room for error during either migration. The businesses needed to maintain ‘business-as-usual’ with no disruption to sales,” said Hurney. “We really leaned into the service and support offered by Validity, ensuring the ramp-up and warm-up strategies we implemented worked and worked quickly, especially as we approached Q4—our most important period of the year for sales and revenue.”
BrandAlley’s email service provider, Emarsys, is also a fan of the partnership with Validity. “Technology brings a helping hand to good campaigns, and that’s what we have here. Emarsys feeds better data into BrandAlley’s strategy, and Validity Sender Certification removes the blockers that prevent them from delivering that strategy,” explained Steve Henderson, Head of Deliverability at Emarsys.
“Every morning, we receive a scheduled report, summarizing our deliverability performance across our various IPs, so we can keep a close eye on performance. It’s a real peace-of-mind factor.”
Michelle Hurney – Head of Marketing, BrandAlley
The results:
A 99.7% inbox placement rate and significant revenue uplift.
Equipped with solutions to monitor, analyze, and maintain their reputation in real time, BrandAlley has cemented its status as a top-of-the-line email sender.
BrandAlley maintains an outstanding 99.7 percent inbox placement rate, meaning they have successfully avoided penalties that high-volume, high-frequency senders typically incur with mailbox providers.
Their Sender Score is consistently between 99 and 100—putting them firmly in league with best-in-class senders.
The Validity Certification benefit means BrandAlley can reach an additional 100 million inboxes per year, compared with their non-Certified cohorts. Given the average revenue each BrandAlley email typically earns, this has resulted in a significant revenue uplift.
This sense of security also gives BrandAlley peace of mind when trying new campaign strategies and creative designs. “Very little that happens in BrandAlley that doesn’t require Validity’s support!” summarizes Hurney.
BrandAlley is the UK’s largest, flash-sales, members-only ecommerce site that is home to best-in-class labels in fashion, beauty, and homeware. Since its inception in 2008, BrandAlley has stocked an extensive selection of previous and current season stock at up to 80 percent off. With new brands launching every week, BrandAlley’s flash sales are exclusive and filled with highly in-demand pieces—meaning time is of the essence for shoppers.