Take a bow NZ Post

For over 170 years, NZ Post has been delivering mail, but what most people don’t fully understand is that service levels (and we're talking about deliverability) have been unbelievably good—so good in fact, that people simply expect the mail to get through.  Bad addressing and changes of address, are just part of what the people at NZ Post have to deal with every day. Then add to that network issues like storms, epidemics and a whole host of other issues. 

End of an era – but what’s next, and are there consequences?

But all good things must come to an end, and in the case of physical mail, there is now a mass exodus to digital channels, with email being the most popular. The decline has seen mail volumes fall from one billion mail items 10 years ago, to less than two hundred million today – with a forecast of closer to one hundred million in just a couple of years’ time.  

What are the consequences for business senders like banks, telco’s, utilities, the financial services sector and government?  

It’s now a deliverability issue ..... But then I hear you thinking, “Aren’t all email services the same?” Unfortunately, email deliverability can be a far cry from what enterprises have been used to with physical mail. For those thinking that they can use their campaign platforms like Braze, Constant Contact, Mailchimp, Marketo, Salesforce, and Vision6, my advice is to think again. Email deliverability is typically in the 90% range, sometimes as low as 80 to 85%. 

But then maybe you have done a little research and established that there are specialist providers of transactional email services. However even then, at the top end, 95% seems to be the going deliverability rate. Upon reflection, NZ Post, who generally delivered over 99% of all mail lodgements, now looks mighty good. 

Impacts of poor email deliverability

The issue is that it is now the sending business that needs to build the “triage” processes into their back-office operations. For a business sending out 100,000 items a month, if only 95% of all emails were delivered, that’s 5,000 emails that will now need to be remediated. 

Maybe the non-delivered emails are turned into print and mail and sent via the postal service. Maybe they are referred to the call centre so the recipients can be rung. But it becomes rather embarrassing if the email address is correct in the first place! Both options are also expensive, and then there are delivery delays that need to be factored in. 

One email provider stands out from the rest.

But what if there was a local digital delivery platform that guaranteed 99% email delivery? That business is Cumulo9, which has been around for more than 15 years and is the most “trusted” platform for many of New Zealand’s largest email senders. 

There are many reasons why Cumulo9 can achieve such a high deliverability rate, one of which is a Cumulo9-developed Mail Transfer Agent (MTA), which is hosted locally. Another is simply a local team of support people who work closely with senders and the ESPs (Email Service Providers), being proactive to ensure that every email gets through – just like the posties of the past. Then, there are very clever sending (throttling) algorithms that have a big impact on deliverability. 

There are also a bunch of other reasons why businesses have chosen Cumulo9’s C9 Transact digital sending platform, which also handles eInvoices (Peppol), SMS, and push notifications. But that’s a story for another day. 

What’s the call to action?  

If your business has a hospital process and is now re-handling an ever-growing volume of undelivered emails – get in touch. 

Or maybe you just aren’t aware that there is an issue – after all, aren’t all email service providers alike, and aren’t all emails you send instantly delivered to someone’s inbox?!