Case study - Travel
Kiwi.com was losing campaign reach to spam placement and volume caps. It moved marketing email off Mailgun, then ran Omnivery against SendGrid in a split environment on transactional mail. Over twelve months Omnivery delivered a 17% improvement in unique click rate.
Published April 2024
Kiwi.com in numbers
Kiwi.com began when Oliver Dlouhý, struggling to book cheap flights for a holiday, decided to build a flight search engine of his own, with Jozef Képesi joining him to develop it. By 2017 Deloitte had named Kiwi.com the fastest-growing technology company in Central Europe in the Rising Star category of its Technology Fast 50, on the strength of delivering low-cost travel.
The email that platform sends is not promotional in nature. It is the booking, the e-ticket and the itinerary change, and it is often the only record a traveler holds.
"Emails we send are critical for communicating purchased flights. They must reach the recipient and with Omnivery they do."
Jakub Semotam, CRM Team Leader, Kiwi.com
Kiwi.com's objective was to improve customer satisfaction by ensuring its transactional and marketing email reached the inbox rather than the spam folder, while still being able to scale the business through increased volume.
Those two goals were in tension with the providers it had. Reach degraded exactly when volume grew.
"We were concerned about deliverability. At higher volumes, our campaigns were sent to spam or capped by many providers. Omnivery proved to be a valuable partner in increasing our deliverability."
Jakub Semotam, CRM Team Leader, Kiwi.com
A provider that throttles a sender at higher volumes, or whose shared reputation cannot carry the traffic, produces exactly this pattern: acceptable results in testing, deteriorating results in production.
Kiwi.com moved in sequence rather than all at once, keeping production traffic on the incumbent until each stage had proved itself.
Marketing email first. Kiwi.com initially switched to Omnivery from Mailgun for marketing email. The performance gains there led to the second stage.
Then transactional, as a split test. Kiwi.com deployed Omnivery to its transactional messaging in a split environment running against SendGrid, so both providers carried comparable traffic over the same twelve months and could be measured directly against each other.
Kiwi.com sends both streams with Omnivery today, marketing and transactional, on separate DKIM signing keys and separate IP pools so the two reputations stay independent.
The whole switch took 45 minutes, and it was not being rushed. No integration work was required: Kiwi.com pointed its domain at our compatible APIs and webhooks, and one-click data migration moved the existing configuration across. Neither stage changed the workflow Kiwi.com's teams were already using, so there were no new tools or interfaces to learn. The integration runs through Bloomreach Engage.
"A 17% increase is massive and ultimately provides the best experience for Kiwi customers. Omnivery and their team is superior. They proactively helped us get a place in the BIMI pilot testing, set up DMARC processing, and our other teams found support from them in setting up domains and subdomains."
Jakub Semotam, CRM Team Leader, Kiwi.com
Over the twelve months following the switch, Omnivery delivered a 17% improvement in unique click rate over SendGrid on the same transactional traffic.
Unique click rate counts distinct recipients who engaged, not repeat interactions, so the gain means more travelers reached their booking information.
Alongside the click-rate result, Kiwi.com reported:
The drop in complaints has a cost attached to it. A traveler who does not receive a booking confirmation contacts support, and that contact is an expense as well as a dissatisfied customer. Deliverability on transactional mail shows up in the support queue before it shows up in a report.
At a glance
Omnivery accepts SendGrid v3, Mailgun v3 and SparkPost v1 requests natively, so an existing integration moves by changing a base URL and a key. The technical work is minutes; domain vetting takes one to three working days, so start there.