Oxford University Press

“Mailrelay‘s SMTP engine lets us reach our subscribers with the highest delivery guarantees. The work done to optimize our database and recover our domain’s reputation was essential for our email marketing to become effective and to grow our number of subscribers/sends.”

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Key Points

• Locating and eliminating spam traps
• Organizing the database to make it more effective
• Improving email delivery to Hotmail
• Reviewing settings such as SPF

About Oxford University Press

It is the largest university press in the world, with more than 500 years of teaching experience. The publishing house of the University of Oxford is present in more than 50 countries and publishes the 20-volume Oxford English Dictionary, the equivalent of the Spanish Royal Academy’s Dictionary of the Spanish Language.

Oxford University Press has successfully adapted to new technologies and e-learning, which is why it created My Oxford English, its online system built on the philosophy of learning English wherever, however and whenever you want.

It lets students learn English with complete freedom and offers a wide range of teaching materials, humorous videos, a system for achieving accurate pronunciation, a virtual campus for interacting with other students (with additional teaching materials), English lessons by phone with a tutor and the chance to take study trips to Oxford, among other services.

Mass email communications are one of its most valuable tools for reaching both companies interested in its services and its students.

Objectives

The main goal of using Mailrelay was to make sure that the training courses promoted through its email marketing, sent at varying intervals, and the free educational content for learning English, sent monthly, reached subscribers efficiently.

Even though its email marketing campaigns were sent to an optimized customer base, some spam filters kept them from reaching recipients’ inboxes (which is quite common), making the response rate lower than it really was. For that reason, its existing infrastructure was analyzed to improve the way receiving servers accept its bulk sends.

Actions Taken

One of the first actions was to advise them on how to improve the way they sent their emails and avoid false positives on incoming servers. To that end, their DNS records were optimized, helping to eliminate spam false positives.

Also worth highlighting is the work done to recover their domain’s reputation and help their email marketing get through to receiving servers more efficiently, which was achieved largely thanks to our agreements with Hotmail, AOL, etc. After we got in touch with them and demonstrated the legitimacy of their sends, deliverability improved by more than 30%.

Results

Both the promotional newsletters for new training courses and the emails we send to everyone interested in their free English teaching service are delivered quickly and securely to subscribers’ inboxes.

The personalized consulting and the work they carried out allowed us to recover our domain’s reputation, and they were essential for our email marketing to become effective and to grow our number of subscribers/sends.

Sending newsletters is a very valuable complement to the field work of our sales force, and the difference between landing in the spam folder or the inbox is worth hundreds of thousands of euros a year.

“The service offered by Mailrelay is very complete and efficient, whether sending directly from its email marketing platform (from a web browser) or sending from Microsoft Outlook using the SMTP sending engine they make available to each of their customers.

Mailrelay has fully met our expectations in everything related to email marketing: a user-friendly interface, ease of use, effective delivery and qualified staff. Thanks to the advice and expertise Mailrelay shared with us, our sends are more effective.

I would recommend it without any hesitation, whatever the company’s line of business. After all, it is a platform that puts your newsletters in your subscribers’ inboxes; that is what it does, and it does it perfectly.”

María Burgues,
Mailing Manager at Myoxfordenglish.