Email problems are costly

Last week Zulily released their quarterly earnings. Their earnings’ report was disappointing, resulting in a drop in their stock prices. The chairman of the company told reporters on a conference call that part of the reason for the drop in earnings were due to deliverability problems “at a large ISP.”

Zulily ran into problems with a large email provider — issues which resulted in the retailer being unable to send out its daily email blasts to some customers.
No emails, no sales.

As a result of the weak earnings, Zulily stock dropped nearly 20%.
The reports don’t say specifics about what happened or which ISP was the problem. Given what I know about the makeup of consumer lists, I’d have to say the issue was either at Yahoo or Gmail. Those two providers together make up over 50% of most consumer lists. Both companies have complex filtering processes that do not rely solely on IP address reputation, but look at content and a host of other factors.
Deliverability is critical for companies these days and even a short period of delivery problems can have serious financial implications.

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