Wireless Dealer Magazine's Improved Sender Reputation Delivers Results

Problem: Wireless Dealer Magazine, a trade publication targeted at manufacturers, retailers and wholesalers in the wireless retail and wholesale businesses, had e-mail deliverability issues.

Solution: WDM paired with e-mail marketing firm StreamSend to rework its e-mail strategy.

Results: Due to an im-proved sender reputation, WDM's open and clickthrough rates increased 50 percent.

Hampered by a poor sender reputation, which included being blacklisted by some e-mail service providers, Houston-based WDM struggled to get its daily marketing e-blasts into the inboxes of its 46,000 subscribers. This resulted in unhappy advertisers, who felt they weren't getting their money's worth.

So in June 2008, WDM turned to StreamSend, a Sacramento, Calif.-based e-mail marketing firm, for help. The first step was to re-establish WDM's reputation as a legitimate e-mail marketer.

"A lot of our clients were expecting big results from the e-mail blasting campaigns," says Leo Medrano, WDM's director of operations. "By us getting clean, it enabled [advertisers] to generate more business."

To clean up WDM's sender reputation, StreamSend gave it a private IP address. This allowed WDM to take complete control of its sender reputation, without having to rely on Internet service providers. WDM was tasked with rebuilding its reputation through implementing e-mail delivery best practices, including setting up a sender policy framework record.

WDM's e-mail makeover also involved an extensive cleaning of its mailing list. The publisher called subscribers to verify names, e-mail addresses, titles, etc. WDM also was careful to respect subscribers' opt-out requests in a timely manner. To keep the subscriber list at roughly 46,000 names, WDM is constantly adding new leads to the list to replace those opt-outs.

WDM has seen a 50 percent increase in its open and clickthrough rates. Those increased rates have translated into greater satisfaction from advertisers, many of whom, in turn, have become repeat customers - 90 percent, to be exact, according to Medrano.

Now, WDM is even expanding its reach. With StreamSend's software, the publisher is able to e-mail internationally, reaching a significant part of its database that previously had gone untapped.

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