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Customer Profile

Dice Achieves 95 Percent Email Deliverability and Constant Email Process Improvement

Since its beginning as a job search bulletin board in 1991, Dice has grown into the leading provider of specialized career sites and career fairs for technology and engineering, accounting and finance, capital markets and security-cleared professionals.

Like many companies, Dice is highly dependent on email to communicate with job seekers, corporate customers and prospects. With an average email message volume in excess of one million per day, the company needed a way to increase deliverability and improve email tracking and monitoring across multiple channels.

Tackling the Challenges of System Complexity and Inefficiencies

The previous Dice email solution encompassed 15 mail servers, making the monitoring, management and operational recovery of Dice's email systems complex, expensive, and in many cases, impractical. Every mail channel had a different process, causing excessive inefficiencies. In addition, there was no way to effectively track deliverability, resolve bounced email or efficiently handle the high email volumes that Dice required. As a result, as much as 10 percent of Dice's email did not reach its intended audience, which ultimately affected Dice's bottom line through increased marketing costs.

Dice was effectively using a "complaint-based" methodology to manage email delivery. "We assumed that deliverability was successful unless we had reason to believe otherwise," said O'Neill. "We knew we had consistent deliverability problems, but due to the complexity of our environment and the lack of tracking information, it was impractical for us to process the bounced messages."

Dice originally approached Message Systems in April 2006 with aspirations to consolidate its 15 servers onto a single platform within its existing Linux environment in an effort to simplify management and operational recovery and improve reputation management. "We could have done it on a system-by-system basis but it would have taken an army of people to add those services across 15 platforms," said O'Neill. "It made much more sense for us to consolidate under one platform and then implement reputation management one time in a centralized, high quality fashion."

Dice embarked on a "proof-of-concept" approach to determine if the Message Systems software could address their problems. A five percent increase in deliverability during the pilot program would spell success. Because Dice's deliverability was already ranging between 85% and 90%, the bar was set high.

The process was rapid. Message Systems Professional Services installed the software in less than a week and created customized reports to assist with ROI analysis. "The quality of the Services group was extraordinary," said O'Neill. "They've been one of the best vendors to work with that we've seen in awhile. They were extremely responsive."

The pilot concluded a month later, achieving an initial six percent increase in deliverability and a corresponding increase in job applications from its high-tech job seeker audience, well exceeding the five percent bar set for the pilot.

Moving to Consistent Email Process Improvement

Since Dice began transmitting email via the Message Systems solution, job alert bounce rates have dropped to between one and two percent, and Dice consistently delivers more than 95 percent of its messages. It has also realized a marked increase in email delivery speed. "It used to take six hours to send a half-million daily JobAlerts to our technology and engineering job seekers," said O'Neill. "Now it takes less than an hour. In fact, because each message is unique, we can't generate them fast enough to outrun our Message Systems server."

Dice can better monitor all of its email campaigns and react immediately and more effectively to any deliverability issues that arise. "We now have full visibility into our email operations and the process is much more controlled," said O'Neill. "Today, if a message bounces back, for example, we know right away why it didn't get to the recipient and can make immediate adjustments."

"In the past, we had deliverability problems on a fairly frequent basis and we would just cross our fingers and hope our messages made it to the end users' inboxes," said O'Neill. "With Message Systems we know. We can tell you very specifically our deliverability percentages, what our trends are over time and when we make changes to a communication product, we can assess the impact those changes have on deliverability."

"It was absolutely essential to Dice's ongoing success to migrate to an email platform that can evolve and grow with us," O'Neill continued. "With Message Systems, we can confidently meet all our business needs while consistently improving our email process."

The Payoff

"We can assume that the improved deliverability of messages has positively impacted our marketing efforts, which has helped fuel our tremendous business growth this year," said O'Neill. "Moreover, the Message Systems software solution paid for itself in the first 90 days of operation and we are highly confidant that we will exceed a 20-fold ROI-a potential cost savings in excess of $1 million-in three years."

What's next?

"By using Message Systems to tune and optimize our processes, fix deliverability problems and handle reputation management, we've seen an overall increase in deliverability of between five and 10 percent," said O'Neil. "Based on this and the other tangible benefits of more effective issue resolution, lower operating costs through server consolidation, and more reliable communication with our customers and prospects, we look forward to expanding the Message Systems solution across all Dice Holdings, Inc. businesses and anticipate seeing the same types of improvements in those channels as we've seen with the core Dice communications."

There are also plans to provide real-time communication to the Job Seeker and Recruitment Customer communities to replace Dice's current batch-oriented process that requires an overnight run. "With our increased confidence in the speed of deliverability and how fast we can send out targeted communications, we are looking at additional strategic opportunities to provide more timely notification of opportunities in the marketplace. We believe this will engender additional loyalty in our customer and job seeker community," O'Neill explained.

O'Neill enthusiastically recommends Messages Systems to other companies that send high volumes of business-critical email. "Our experience has been fantastic and this has been one of the more trouble-free projects I've been involved with in my two-and-a-half years with Dice. I have no doubt that other organizations looking for email solutions will have the same experience with Message Systems as we have had at Dice."