INDUSTRY: Email Services Provider

Bluestreak is a leading provider of digital marketing technologies and services that help global marketers and agencies connect and interact with their online customers.

Bluestreak required new email rendering and delivery engines to increase email processing speed and gain better insight into its overall email deliverability.

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Deliverability Rate Soars. Bounce Rates Decline. Customer Satisfaction Climbs.

Staying competitive in the rapidly evolving world of email deliverability requires ESPs to be nimble while providing powerful email campaign engines for their marketer customers. To meet the demands of its growing customer base of marketers and agencies Bluestreak needed to increase email processing speed and as well an overall deliverability. The resulting implementation of Momentum™ not only increased Bluestreak's email deliverability capacity from three million emails per hour to 10 million emails per hour, but also decreased email bounce rates by more than 2.5 percent.

Business-Critical Mission Accomplished: Email Delivery Improvements Achieved

As CTO of Bluestreak, Chuck Ellis was concerned that his company's current technology needed to outpace the competition in the hyper-competitive email space. While Bluestreak's customer base was growing well, customers were growing smarter about the ROI on email deliverability and demanding better delivery accountability and lower bounce rates. For Bluestreak's customers, accurate metrics would ultimately justify that marketing budgets were being well spent by using Bluestreak to execute their email campaigns. Ellis knew that putting a system in place that improved performance and deliverability on a sustained, long-term basis was critical and would further validate the value of the Bluestreak solution.

• Faster, deeper visibility across the email operation.
  In order to raise email deliverability rates for Bluestreak's customers, Ellis understood that he needed faster and deeper visibility into the entire email operation. What were the bounce rates by domain and bounce type? What types of bounces could be resolved via technical solutions? Were there specific ISP bounce rates that denoted possible red flags?
  Ellis also knew from experience that having the answers to these questions usually engendered more questions: How can Bluestreak more effectively tune and shape its email traffic to ensure deliverability and provide faster and better service? What actions need to be taken to lower the bounce back rates and, in turn, increase the effectiveness of customers' email campaigns?
  Bluestreak did not want to recreate the wheel if there was already a solution on the market that met all their requirements and could easily integrate with their existing platform. This led Ellis to Message Systems.

• Flexible, and easily integrated secure solution.
  When searching for a new messaging solution to augment its email platform, Bluestreak wanted an email solution with an extremely fast Message Transfer Agent (MTA) that was also flexible and compatible with the latest email protocols. The solution also needed to have superior security and support multiple language formats.
  After careful review of several offerings on the market, Ellis found in Message Systems an email solution that met all of his requirements. "It was clear early on in the review process that Momentum was superior," Ellis said. "It was certainly the most powerful engine on the market where speed is concerned and also offered the most comprehensive set of deliverability tools available. But what also set Message Systems apart is that its solution is software-based versus being housed in an appliance, as is the case with most of the MTAs available. This ultimately made implementation a very smooth process."

• Performance Optimized from Inception
  Bluestreak went live with Message Systems' solution in February 2006. The result brought immediate and dramatic performance improvements. Perhaps even more important, Bluestreak has arrived at a process of continuous email deliverability improvement. "Whereas before it was a guessing game as to why emails were or were not delivered, we now have the whole picture of email deliverability," Ellis said.

The Bottom Line: Bounce Rate Improved by 2.5%; Bluestreak Empowered to Shape Traffic on Behalf of Customers

Since implementing Momentum, Bluestreak's bounce rate has improved by more than 2.5 percent. Furthermore, the Message Systems solution intelligently categorizes email depending on the nature of the bounce or traffic levels, allowing Bluestreak to shape traffic on its clients' behalf.

The combination of fast delivery speed, improved forensics and lower bounce back rates for Bluestreak has resulted in immense improvements in its customers' email campaign success. This, in turn, allows Bluestreak customers to better justify email initiatives to their executives.