Validity is on a roll! On August 18, the company specializing in data quality and email deliverability announced Everest, which is the result of the merger of Return Path, 250ok and BriteVerify solutions. A sort of meta-platform around deliverability issues!
Who is Validity?
Validity is the company that in just over 2 years has acquired a significant number of companies in the world of data quality and deliverability. Among the most important acquisitions, we can mention:
- 250ok in February 2020
- Retun Path in May 2019
- BriteVerify as of May 2018
Validity presents itself as "the most trusted name in customer data quality".
Everest, email success platform
In its press release, Validity introduces Everest as a suite, "Validity built Everest to give marketers everything they need to ensure email success. Everest is a comprehensive email analytics platform powered by Validity's proprietary data feeds, the industry's largest data network with widespread integration and support across the email ecosystem."
In a nutshell, Validity has integrated some of the functionality of 250ok, Return Path and BriteVerify into a single platform.
While some features of these 3 players were redundant and others complementary, it was obvious that an integration/merger would take place. The speed of this announcement is noteworthy, as the 250ok acquisition took place just over six months before the Everest announcement.
What does this mean in practice?
In order to organize the multitude of tools present in the 3 original solutions, Validity decided to classify them into 3 categories. These categories represent the three phases of email campaign design: preparation of the campaign before sending, analysis of the campaign sending, and analysis of the results when the campaign is finished.
In addition to these 3 parts, an alert configuration center is present, as well as the possibility to create custom dashboards.
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Those who are used to 250ok will not feel lost, the interface takes up many of its concepts.
Here are the details of the different features of Everest:
Pre-send : To prepare your email sending
- List validation Analysis of email addresses in a database.
- Design and Content : Test rendering of emails on different platforms, validation of images and links, ... the functionality clearly comes from 250ok.
- Competitive intelligence This feature comes from Return Path and allows you to track the email practices of other brands.
In-Flight : Optimize the deliverability of your emails
- Inbox placement We are here in what Return Path and 250ok were well known for, the use of seedlists in order to check where your messages arrive (inbox, spam, ...) in the different messaging systems.
- Certification Return Path's essential service (in certain cases) allowing, after certification of your practices, to relax the filtering rules of certain messaging systems.
- Optimization of the opening moment (VTO) Recently announced feature to optimize delivery time when users are logged in (only for Yahoo and AOL recipients for now)
Monitoring: Analyze the performance of your shipments
- Reputation We are here also at the heart of the functionalities proposed in their time by 250ok and Return Path, we find the best of both platforms with :
- Monitoring of blacklists
- Monitoring of spamtraps
- Return Path's famous SenderScore
- Analysis of SNDS data (Microsoft)
- Google Postmaster Tools data analysis
- Analysis of SignalSpam data
- …
- Commitment It seems that the 250ok analysis module has been chosen for the engagement analysis. This module allows you to find all the data that allows you to analyze the marketing performance and deliverability of your mailings using the data generated by your campaign management solution.
- Infrastructure Again, this is the DMARC monitoring of 250ok which was retained (Return Path having sold its DMARC activity a few years ago).
What to remember about Everest?
Everest is clearly an ambitious project (as is Validity). We end up with a "one-stop-shopping" in all the functionalities related to email marketing and which are not directly related to the campaign management solution. The market for deliverability monitoring is now in the hands of a handful of actors after the acquisition of eDataSource by Sparkpost end of 2019.
One wonders if other takeovers/consolidations will not take place in the near future. We can for example think of players like Litmus or Email On Acid.
Coming back to the platform, the integration work looks great and does not seem to be at the expense of ergonomics as we have seen on other occasions. It now remains to be seen what this will do in terms of offering. Many Return Path customers on certification are also 250ok customers for monitoring, they are probably eager to know more.
Disclaimer (and more if affinity)!
As you may know, Badsender has been a partner of 250ok for several years. If you want to know more about our deliverability monitoring offer, please feel free to contact us or to visit the special page on the agency part of our site.
Everest screenshots and logo are property of Validity.
Cover photo by Christopher Burns on Unsplash
