CINC accelerates deliverability with SendGrid's Expert Partnership

Commissions Inc. (CINC) is a comprehensive technology solution that connects top tier real estate brokers and agents to homebuyers and sellers. Founded in 2011, CINC has become one of the fastest growing real estate technology platforms in North America.

Doug Forester is the Sr. Product Manager of Email at CINC, responsible for optimizing deliverability and sending the right message to the right people at the right time on behalf of the thousands of companies using CINC’s platform.

Challenge

CINC has been a happy SendGrid customer since it was a startup in 2011. Because they grew so quickly, CINC began experiencing deliverability issues with property alert emails in 2016 and engaged with SendGrid’s Expert Services team to address them.

CINC completed the high-level recommendations provided by SendGrid’s team, but didn’t have the resources available to implement other ancillary recommendations. “In 2017, we realized these items were still critical and we needed to jump back in,” says Doug. The team was facing:

• Continued challenges with deliverability at Gmail, with only 40% of email making it into the inbox. “We get 60% of platform leads from Gmail, so improving this was critical for us,” says Doug.
• Limited availability of internal resources, due to hiring difficulty of finding additional technical talent within the email deliverability niche.
• The challenge of interpreting and reacting to the changing email landscape so that they can continuously improve their email program for their clients.

Solution

The CINC team was excited to leverage with SendGrid’s Expert Partnership, which gave them:

• A group of experts acting as an extension of CINC’s email team with ongoing premium support, proactive account management and monitoring, and delivery consulting. “SendGrid’s team helped us validate ways to improve our program faster, and they could spend time digging into email data so I could focus on other critical things,” says Doug.
• Tools like 250ok and eDatasource for monitoring email performance with experts to interpret the stats. “The team has helped us maximize the use of these tools and validate what we were seeing with industry-leading recommendations that were good for our business model,” says Doug.

Result

With SendGrid’s experts, Doug and his team were able to quickly reach their goal of resolving deliverability challenges at Gmail with 97-99% inbox placement.

SendGrid’s Expert Services team worked with Doug to create a sunset policy for unengaged Gmail traffic, resulting in aggregate emails delivered to Gmail increasing by 75% with increased open rates and click rates, demonstrating that their client’s customers using Gmail are more engaged.

According to Doug, “We were moving in the right track with email deliverability, but I don’t think our deliverability would have increased as quickly without SendGrid’s team.”

Bottom Line

SendGrid is a perfect fit for CINC because of its:

• Email Experts. SendGrid is the only people-first email provider, with an experienced team of email experts with over 95 years combined experience.
• Industry knowledge. From having leadership at all of the email industry organizations to relationships with ISPs like Gmail and Microsoft, SendGrid lives and breathes email so you don’t have to.
• Reliability. Doug and his team can focus on creating and innovating the product because they can trust their deliverability and scale to SendGrid’s platform.