Country fashion house becomes Return Path certified to boost growing ecommerce and international business

Country fashion house becomes Return Path certified to boost growing ecommerce and international business

Joules Clothing is a UK-based clothing retailer, with over 60 locations nationwide and a rapidly expanding ecommerce, catalogue, wholesale and not least international business.

To further the growth of its online business, as well as support its international expansion, Joules relies heavily on email marketing as well as social media marketing, which are the primary drivers of traffic to Joules’ new website. In 2010, the direct part of Joules business, which the company spent several years building already represented 20 % of total sales turnover.

Providing its readers with exclusive offers and updates, Joules sends out between 2 and 3 million emails a month through its direct marketing agency more2 and its digital marketing and e-customer relationship management (eCRM) systems provider Profusion. To support its ambitious expansion plans outside the UK and given the fact that email due to its relative low marketing cost is an extremely competitive channel, Joules wanted to ensure it reached the inbox of all its subscribers and wasn’t mistakenly junked or rejected by internet service providers (ISPs) around the world.

Improving inbox visibility

Return Path’s advanced reporting of inbox placement rates showed that only 78% of Joules emails were delivered to the inbox successfully, while the remaining 22% were placed in the spam or junk folders. With email critical to the success of its growing online business, Joules sought to improve deliverability and gain maximum exposure in the inbox vis-à-vis the growing competition by competitive brands. As such, it needed to ensure ISPs would deliver its emails to the recipients’ inboxes by proving that it was a responsible and reputable email sender.

Supported by more2 and its technology partner Profusion, Joules applied to join the Return Path Certification programme in 2011. This global programme provides the largest and broadest email whitelist covering more than 100 ISPs worldwide, including over 2 billion consumer mailboxes. With Return Path enforcing rigorous standards for all certified clients, ISPs are able to use this whitelist to help them identify good responsible senders of email – and thus more easily filter out unwanted spam, allowing certified senders’ emails to go through to the inbox.

To become Return Path certified, senders such as Joules have to prove that they meet stringent standards in the areas of permission practices, privacy policies and disclosures, but also compliance with applicable laws and sending email only from properly configured and authenticated servers.

Updating email communications

More2 and Profusion worked closely with Joules to ensure that the sending infrastructure used for the email programme would adhere to Return Path’s strict standards required as part of the certification programme. During the application phase but also once certified, Return Path will continuously monitor specific key performance indicators (KPIs), including complaint rates and spam trap hits, as well as blacklist listings, to ensure that these standards are being met. As a responsible sender, Joules was then accepted on to the Return Path certification programme.

Comparing data from the month prior to certification and immediately after, Joules saw its inbox placement rate skyrocket to an astounding average of 99.8%, with a corresponding decrease of junked email to a mere 0.2 %. For some of the most important domains relative to its subscriber base – including hotmail.com, hotmail.co.uk, yahoo.co.uk and ntlworld.com – Joules’ inbox placement rate post certification reached a perfect 100%.

In addition to increased deliverability, certified senders gain the additional advantage of improving email engagement due to their email images being automatically displayed and links enabled as a default at both Hotmail and Yahoo! Becoming a Return Path certified sender therefore helped Joules not only increase its inbox placement but also open rates, which in the course of the same month showed more than 14% more opens overall.

Optimising marketing interaction

“Given the growing importance of our online business as well as our International markets and with email being one of the primary drivers for this business, we wanted to make sure we got the best possible response to our campaigns,” commented Karen Rawlings, Joules head of customer planning, insight and marketing.

“Optimising the email content and design is only one side of the coin though, as only those emails which our recipients actually see in their inbox can generate a response. Becoming Return Path Certified has helped us on more than just one level. Not only do we now have complete confidence that the emails which we spend so much time and effort creating really reach the intended recipient – we also enjoy new benefits such as our email images being automatically displayed. For a business which is making a living by how things look this is huge,” Rawlings concluded.