How an Email Switch Delivers Strategic Impact
Migrating from Oracle Dyn
London-based FanFinders launched Your Baby Club UK in 2013 with one simple objective: deliver permission-based marketing to parents through first-party consent and consumer choice—and with zero spam. Since then, the company has acquired more than four million members and more than 80% of the UK baby market. FanFinders recently launched Your Baby Club US, acquiring more than 20% of the American market within 12 months and planning to grow at 100k new members per month. The company is also preparing to go to market in the EU. “We bring brands and consumers together in a mutually beneficial exchange,” says Alec Dobbie, FanFinders’ CEO and co-founder, “so we need very good, strong communication channels.”
“We should have transitioned a long time before we did. SocketLabs have been a breath of fresh air comparatively.“
While FanFinders was a long-term user of the Oracle Dyn Email Service, there were ongoing issues around customer experience and cost. So when Oracle released an end-of-life plan for the product, FanFinders decided to make a change—with SocketLabs quickly emerging as the obvious choice. Says Dobbie: “We briefly used another platform in the past, but something happened in their infrastructure and our Gmail inbox rates were going down considerably. But when we migrated our email to SocketLabs, our inbox rates went back up. We send a lot of email, and we need them to get to the inbox. It’s incredibly important that people can open our emails, and they can only open them if they’re not in spam.”
Getting the job done
For FanFinders, email is the very fabric of its business. So, a primary success measurement is email performance and deliverability. “I’m judging performance by how many times an email gets into an inbox,” asserts Dobbie, “or, conversely, how many times it’s not getting into an inbox. SocketLabs will be an important part of making sure our consumers get the best deals from the best brands as soon as possible.”
As FanFinders further expands into the US market—with plans to double both net-new members and returning members over the next year—email is increasingly important. Notes Dobbie: “We’re averaging 50,000 new members in the US per month, and we aim to scale that by at least a factor of two in the next 12 months. Achieving those goals will be reliant on our ability to communicate with those people via email.
Personalized expert service
Dobbie says the managed migration from Oracle Dyn to SocketLabs was seamless and quick—and required almost no interaction with SocketLabs’ technical resources. But, the company has since worked directly with SocketLabs’ customer support and consultants, finding the team highly engaged and responsive. “Our previous solution worked technically, but it wasn’t a great experience. With SocketLabs, we’re not just a number. I’ve got a name of a person I can ring up, if I’ve got a problem. That personal level of support makes a world of difference.”
This close partnership allowed FanFinders to gradually and confidently increase its email volume over its various IP addresses with the SocketLabs platform and helped the company establish its reputation with Internet Service Providers (ISPs) as a legitimate email sender. Per Dobbie, “Moving across and to new IPs, and getting them warm with our domains, so we could have a high sending reputation, was incredibly key. We could push more and more email to SocketLabs, and they dealt with it—they made it seamless for us to do.”
Life after Oracle Dyn
In June of 2019, Oracle announced end of life for the Oracle Dyn Email service “in favor of” an upgraded version of the Oracle Cloud Infrastructure Platform. The reported EOL date is May 31, 2020. If you are a current Oracle Dyn Email user, your immediate next step is critical. Will email be just one facet of your new platform or its primary focus? And, will that platform come with a dedicated team of experts that helps guide you to success?
Your email delivery success is extremely dependent upon your service provider’s reputation, expertise, and technology. Learn about the five key things to look for when evaluating your ESP.
Why Choose SocketLabs?
- Cutting-edge email technology
- Highly personalized service
- Managed migration and warming
- An amazing customer experience
