CLAL Finance: Deliverability Assurance

CLAL Finance is the largest and most prominent brokerage firm in Israel, supplying services that run the gamut from brokerage and investment management to mutual funds and underwriting. As such, it relies heavily on email to support and maintain its growing customer base, now at upwards of 80,000 recipients. Among its email business communications are the weekly and monthly information and marketing newsletters sent to current customers and potential prospects.

CLAL was already creating first-class, informative, full-graphic email newsletters when they met ActiveTrail. They had an effective in-house tool for managing their burgeoning user lists. What brought them to ActiveTrail was neither newsletter creation nor email maintenance.

“Our number one problem was deliverability” says Sigalit Tal, Internet Customer Communications Manager at CLAL. “We were not sure we were getting through; the sheer amount of emails often caused our messages to get stuck in SPAM filters. Managing the ISPs and trying to track our email in-house became a costly and time consuming effort. Since email communication is integral to our business, it is absolutely critical that the information reaches its destination.”

After meeting the ActiveTrail team of email experts, CLAL decided it was prudent and cost-effective to outsource to the deliverability experts.

Porting user email lists to the web-based ActiveTrail system was easier than expected and included full integration with CLAL CRM systems, enabling complete user information to be gleaned from their web site and internal legacy systems. Blocked emails and SPAM issues were readily avoided, as ActiveTrail works directly with leading ISPs (AOL/Time-Warner, Yahoo, Gmail, etc.) to assure uninterrupted transmission and immediate handling of delivery issues. ActiveTrail servers are also routinely checked against public blacklists, and delivery tests are conducted with all major ISPs.

Tracking and Measuring Effectiveness

There were immediate results – delivery improved by 46% over usual rates in the initial test period.

Previously, where there were forms to be filled, CLAL was able to track how many responses were received. But ActiveTrail exposed emails that bounced, or were unopened, offering CLAL new insight into the effectiveness of their communications.

ActiveTrail’s comprehensive reporting capabilities enabled CLAL to see detailed delivery statistics including arrived/not, opened/not, number of times opened, number of clicks/visits per link, unsubscribe requests, error types and more. The system’s advanced bounce management engine also classified every bounced email to a category, helping to ascertain what specific problems needed to be addressed.

As well as discovering bounce issues, ActiveTrail detected syntax errors in the emails, which put CLAL’s communications at a higher risk for being labeled SPAM. The Professional Services team additionally assisted with analysis of email subject headers, and other factors contributing to the return of emails.

As an added plus, CLAL discovered it was easier to create newsletters with ActiveTrail’s user-friendly system that requires no knowledge of HTML and no software installation.