Playbook objective
This playbook’s objectives are to:
- Send your first VTO campaign
- Track performance
- VTO is an add-on service to Everest and is not available for all service plans.
- If you are a new Everest customer with no prior relationship with Validity, complete onboarding to ensure you are familiar with navigating and using Everest.
- Ensure you have completed the Everest Basic Set Up Guide.
Important! Be sure you know the number of credits available based on your subscription tier. You can find your subscription information by navigating to My Everest > Account Settings > Subscription.
- Common campaign performance challenges VTO helps solve
- Important metrics related to VTO
- How VTO fits into your process
- Establishing a baseline
- Submitting campaign details so Yahoo recognizes your VTO campaign
- Sending your VTO campaign and reviewing the results
- What to do next
Common sender challenges associated with campaign performance at Yahoo domains are:
- We have a high delivery rate consistently above 98% at Yahoo!, but our open and click rates are flat or declining.
- We implemented Send Time Optimization (STO) at our ESP, but the results are not as good as expected.
By using Everest’s VTO feature, senders see improvements in:
- Open rate
- Click rate
VTO data is delivered directly by Yahoo into Everest, so it’s the best data available to give you insights into campaign performance.
From Everest:
- Open rate
- Click rate
A traditional email marketing process consists of three phases: Pre-Send, In-Flight, and Monitoring. Deciding what campaign to run takes planning based on your company’s business objectives and how you perform against the competition.
Pre-send
- Inform your email campaign strategy with Everest’s Competitive Intelligence feature
- Plan campaign
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Identify target subscriber list
- Identify VTO subscriber list
- Design campaign
- Validate target subscriber list using Everest’s List Validation feature
- Test campaign design using Everest’s Design & Content feature
- Submit VTO campaign details in Everest so Yahoo recognizes your campaign.
In-Flight
- Send campaign to subscribers and the Everest seed list
- View your campaign’s inbox placement, spam, and missing results using Everest’s Inbox Placement feature
- View your VTO campaign’s performance using Everest’s View Time Optimization feature
Monitoring
- Monitor engagement metrics using Everest’s Engagement feature, your ESP, or internal sending platform.
- Monitor sending reputation metrics to understand the deliverability impact.
- Monitor DMARC compliance to identify unauthorized use of your domain and brand using Everest’s Infrastructure feature.
You likely have open and click rate averages for your email program, so use those averages as your baseline. If you don't have these averages, use historical campaign data for at least the past 30-60 days (longer if you can) depending on your sending frequency. As you send VTO campaigns, compare VTO metrics to your baseline to determine if VTO is improving results for Yahoo domains.
Senders see increases in both open and click rates for VTO campaigns. Consider tracking other metrics such as revenue and average order value for VTO campaigns to help determine the return on your VTO investment.
You may also want to create a VTO only baseline to compare VTO campaigns against other VTO campaigns over time. We recommend sending at least five VTO campaigns to establish your VTO only baseline.
In order for Yahoo to recognize your campaign, you need to give them a few details about your campaign and generate a tag to place in your email.
1. Login to Everest
2. Navigate to In-Flight>View Time Optimization
3. Click New VTO Campaign
4. Enter your VTO Campaign’s subject line
5. Enter your from address
6. Enter the campaign start date, start time and time zone
7. Enter the campaign end date and end time
8. Click Next
9. Select a method for campaign identification: Generate a body tag for me
- There are other methods available to identify your campaign but we suggest using a body tag for your first campaign as it is a simple cut and paste of code into your email template.
10. Copy the body tag code and paste into your campaign’s HTML anywhere within the <body> </body> tags
11. Select your ESP
- Contact your ESP if multiple DKIM selectors and signing domains are listed and you don't know which one to choose. You can also check your email headers in Inbox Placement for the correct DKIM information.
- If your ESP is not listed or if you want to manually enter your DKIM signing domain and selector, click Enter DKIM Information Manually and enter the DKIM selector and signing domain.
12. Select how you want undelivered mail to be handled
- For subscribers that don’t log in to their email account during your campaign, you can instruct Yahoo to continue to deliver the mail without VTO benefits or discard the email.
13. Select if you want to automatically A/B test your campaign
14. Click Next
15. Review your campaign details for accuracy and click Back if you need to correct any information
16. If your campaign details are accurate, click Finish
Now you have set up your VTO campaign details, it is time to send your campaign. Be sure you paste the tag code (selected in previous section above) in your HTML template or Yahoo will not be able to identify your campaign.
1. Send your VTO campaign from your ESP or sending platform at the date and times you specified in the previous section above.
2. Login to Everest after the campaign is sent
3. Navigate to In-Flight>View Time Optimization
4. Click the Completed tab
- If you do not see your campaign, it is possible that the data collection is still in progress. Check back at a later time.
5. Click the details arrow next to your completed campaign
6. Review the engagement metrics in the Engagement and Dwell Time tiles and compare them to your baseline results.
- Also compare Optimized (VTO benefits applied) versus Drained (VTO benefits not applied) metrics by clicking each option.
1. Prepare your next VTO campaign and follow the same steps outlined in this playbook to track results.
2. Continue to optimize your email program with other Everest playbooks by using the links below:
