Customer story
Emma
Emma adopted PowerMTA to manage its increasing mail volume efficiently with a minimal investment — scaling to well over 45,000 customers in 51 countries and 400M emails a month.
Sector
Email marketing software
Channels
Headline
400M emails a month
The challenge
A decade-old, home-grown system that couldn't scale.
Emma powers the emails of more than 45,000 organizations worldwide, including Mario Batali, Bridgestone, and Sylvan Learning Center. Headquartered in Nashville, it offers email marketing software and services — email automation, audience segmentation, and mobile email marketing, plus integration with CRM solutions, eCommerce platforms, and social networks. Over the past four years, Emma has experienced a 35% annual growth rate in email messaging volume from its new and existing clients.
Emma developed an innovative Event-Driven Architecture (EDA) that enables it to offer clients sophisticated messaging features — from data-driven insights to email automation — rapidly and without service interruptions. But a major obstacle drove Emma to consider PowerMTA: an expected collision between mail volumes that had risen to almost 400M messages a month and its decade-old, home-grown PHP-based system. The technology had reached its peak and lacked the ability to scale, being cumbersome to configure and missing innovative deployment features and sophisticated delivery controls.
Key features of the old system were either missing or difficult to use, such as customized retry back-offs, rate limiting, multiple DKIM signing, and the ability to react proactively to SMTP reply responses. As the company grew, it would be expensive, awkward, and risky to attempt to scale legacy technology — it was clearly time for a replacement.
The solution
PowerMTA: flexible delivery controls at minimal investment.
After an evaluation and due diligence with other commercial grade MTAs, Emma now uses PowerMTA to manage its increasing mail volume efficiently, with a minimal investment. PowerMTA's flexibility will allow Emma to scale its business exponentially, without bottlenecks or unreasonable expense.
- Flexible configuration.Emma's system administrators were drawn to PowerMTA's flexible logging schematics, easy-to-configure VirtualMTA pools, and the ability to configure retry and total time in queue.
- Efficient at scale. PowerMTA lets Emma send large volumes of mail using modest hardware, so it can grow without scaling its infrastructure spend at the same rate.
- Engagement-driven delivery. PowerMTA v4.5 focused on recipient engagement, now a critical component in maximizing delivery to large inbox providers. Its Scheduled Delivery Control™ lets senders take advantage of time-based engagement metrics to maximize both delivery rates and overall campaign results.
“The pricing made sense, because PowerMTA's feature set met our needs without including a lot of extras that we wouldn't be using. Competing products may incorporate lots of extra features, but if they're not really useful to your product, it's hard to justify the additional expense.”
Marc Powell, Infrastructure Lead at Emma
The results
Volume that scales without bottlenecks or unreasonable expense.
Emma adopted the PowerMTA infrastructure to drive its digital messaging services to well over 45,000 customers in 51 countries. Its digital messaging volume currently averages 1.5M hourly, 12M daily, and 375M monthly — expected to double in the relative near-term, consistent with industry forecasts.
400M
Emails sent every month on PowerMTA, with the headroom to double in the near term.
45,000+
Organizations served across 51 countries, including Mario Batali, Bridgestone, and Sylvan Learning Center.
35%
Annual growth rate in email messaging volume over the past four years.
Carry-forward reference from bird.com. Metrics and named quotes reported by Emma.
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