Company

Headquartered in NY and PA (United States), Listrak is a single, integrated digital marketing platform specifically tailored for retailers. Listrak helps retailers go beyond traditional broadcast emails to make campaigns more relevant and engaging by marrying click-stream behavior and purchase history within a big data product recommendations and personalization suite.

Challenge

Listrak previously used a homegrown custom-built MTA as its outbound sending solution. As the sending solution approached the limit of its throughput capacity, management decided they urgently required a solution with much greater ability to scale.

The in-house solution, had anemic reporting features, poor injection rates, and lacked a digital messaging delivery dashboard. It employed a patched-together mix of servers and VB scripts that had served the company reasonably well, but had reached the limits of its viability. It also lacked a linear path for maximizing throughput across a growing list of eager marketers who wanted their mail sending capability deployed quickly.

The original VB scripts and Microsoft Exchange servers with IIS built-in SMTP service had proved capable of handling the growing volume thus far, but the IT team realized it would be a major challenge to scale high-volume sends using this method. The IT staff briefly experimented with an array of Unix servers tethered to Sendmail, but this solution, too, was overwhelmed by the scalability issues.

Solution

Listrak evaluated the Bird PowerMTA platform for its claimed ability to scale effortlessly and help Listrak’s small IT team author complex configuration settings rapidly and easily.

“It has met and exceeded our expectations. It was crucial that Bird PowerMTA™ empower the delivery team to ‘set it and forget it.’ They love that they can customize all features and directives and execute dynamic configurations, gain insight on auto back-off mode, while modifying queues without downtime. And they appreciate that Port25 Solutions is acutely involved with the latest industry standards, releasing new features and updates as the standards change.”

Andrew Wingle, Principal Delivery Strategist

Listrak decided to collaborate exclusively with Port25 Solutions’ technical support staff to implement a solution that would scale effortlessly, in pace with the company’s present and future growth. The majority of Listrak clients are now on a dedicated VMTA, with roughly 15% of its customers on a shared pool.

Listrak’s decade-long success with Bird PowerMTA™ gives the company confidence that it can continue to deliver unmatched dependability in the digital messaging infrastructure space.

"I’ve been pleased with the overall reliability of the Bird PowerMTA™ environment. It’s a very robust MTA solution, easily installed on a number of operating systems, and highly configurable. I am able to scale my sending environment rather effortlessly. I couldn’t be happier"

Andrew Wingle, Principal Delivery Strategist