Several factors determine whether your messages reach your recipients. In this chalk talk, learn some of the critical factors that affect the deliverability of your messages across messaging channels, such as email and SMS. We walk you through some of the best practices, and we introduce you to deliverability tools, such as Phone Number Validate. With these tools, you can improve your customer reach, increasing the effectiveness of your campaigns and ultimately driving revenue. The intended audience is developers and marketers who send outbound messages. We cover the AWS services Amazon Pinpoint and Amazon Simple Email Service (Amazon SES).

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Understand & Remediate Message Deliverability
Issues to Improve Customer Reach
Kadir Rathnavelu
Senior Product Manager
Amazon Web Services—Messaging and Targeting
D I G 2 0 2

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Agenda
Customer expectations
Understanding email deliverability
Complexity of SMS ecosystem and remediation
Push notifications

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Customer engagement isn’t as simple
as it used to be …

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Customers want to easily …
check a transactional status
secure, access, and monitor their accounts
receive instant account notifications or fraud alerts
get timely, personalized offers and rewards

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But customers aren’t getting this experience ...

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And they get disengaged, disinclined to buy, and
unwilling to switch

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And this affects your message deliverability

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How are companies connecting with customers?
Web portals for
consumers,
advisors/agents
Mobile apps for
consumers,
advisors/agents
Chatbots, voice
commands,
Alexa Skills
Email, text
alerts, push
notifications
Contact center
customer
service
Smart
devices

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Inbox placement
• Inbox providers do not share the secret sauce because they want to
protect their users from spam
• Collective industry knowledge claims that multiple factors affect the
inbox placement (the likelihood of emails landing in the inbox rather
than the spam folder)

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Factors that affect the inbox placement
• Engagement of your customers (open, read, deleted without opening)
• Email content
• Quality of the content
• Common spam fingerprints (‘free,’ ‘!,’ image vs. text ratio)
• List hygiene
• Periodic removal of disengaged users
• Removing bounced addresses
• Offer the ability to unsubscribe
• Email infrastructure (IP addresses, domain)

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Send quality content to your engaged customers

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Monitoring and redressing email deliverability issues
• Monitor the bounce and complaint rates
• The rule of thumb: Bounce rate: <5%, complaint rate: <0.5%
• IP and domain blacklisting
• Open and clicks
• Third-party deliverability tools

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Amazon Pinpoint deliverability dashboard
• Inbox placement rates
• Active dedicated IP monitoring
• Predictive inbox placement tests (proactive)

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Inbox placement rates

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IP monitoring

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Predictive inbox placement tests

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SMS is complex
• SMS does provide an end-to-end delivery acknowledgment. Unlike
TCP/IP (or HTTP), Delivery Receipts (DLR) only provide success/failure
until “next-hop.”
• Telco value chain is driven by least-cost routing which results
in increased latency, reduced deliverability, and conversions.

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Building a reliable “one-hop” network is hard
• 2,050+ telecom operators in
220 countries
• One-hop is not necessarily
reliable; sometimes a carrier-to-
carrier interconnect may be more
reliable than a direct connection
• Location regulations differ

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Some phone numbers block text messages from
short codes

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And the data entry errors …

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Phone numbers require validation
• Customers might accidentally enter their country code twice, not enter
a country code at all, enter a leading zero in front of their phone
number, or any of a variety of other common errors
• Customers might even enter numbers that aren’t capable of receiving
SMS messages, such as landline or Voice over IP (VoIP) numbers

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Delivery status messages are not accurate

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Remediating SMS deliverability issues
• Identify and fix the typographical errors
• Identify the phone number type and send text messages to phone
numbers that can receive text messages
• For other phone numbers, make a voice call (text-to-speech) to deliver
the messages
• Measure the end-to-end action (“conversion”) to understand the
quality of the routes

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Amazon Pinpoint provides a variety of tools to
remediate SMS deliverability issues …

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At least three unique routes for a given phone number
Device
Carrier
Aggregator
Application
Amazon
Pinpoint
98%
73%
99%
98%

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Amazon Pinpoint phone number validate
• Identifies and fixes “typos”
• Supplies phone number metadata to determine the best channel for
delivery
• Depending on the use case, prevents fraud by blocking phone
numbers, for example, international VoIP numbers
Phone Number Cleansed Number Carrier City Zip Code Country Type
0 2065 5XXXXX +1 20655XXXX AT&T Seattle 98101 USA Mobile
+1 1 5512 2XX XXX +1 55122XXXXX Level 3 Hackensack 07601 USA VoIP
55 115 15X XXXX +55911515XXXXX Tim Cellular Sao Paulo N/A Brazil Mobile
+8427507XXXX +8420750XXXXX Viettel Hanoi N/A Vietnam Mobile

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Amazon Pinpoint voice
• Amazon Pinpoint voice channel enables companies to deliver messages
by making phone calls
• Supports dozens of lifelike voices and support for a variety of
languages
• Delivers messages to phone numbers and extends your reach

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Sample voice payload
{"DestinationPhoneNumber": "+120655XXXX",
"OriginationPhoneNumber": "+155122XXXXX",
"CallerId": "+155122XXXXX",
"Content":
{"SSMLMessage":
{"Text": "<speak> Your OTP Code is 1 <break time ="1s"/> 4 <break time="1s"/> 5
<break time="1s"/> 7 <break time = "1s"/> </speak>",
"Voice": "Russell",
"Language": "en-AU"}
}

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It is easy to lose your customers and …

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Mobile apps get muted or, worse, uninstalled …

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Monitoring for push deliverability issues
• The number of app uninstalls – For example, 410 error codes from
Apple Push Notification services (APNs)
• The open rates and app opt-rate, which are direct signals from your
end-users

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Remediating push deliverability issues
• Test and iterate using A/B/n testing, for different vectors (time and
content)
• Explore different formats and channels, such as email and SMS
• Explore different scheduling vectors such as event based in lieu of time
• Modify calls-to-action (CTAs)

37. Thank you!
© 2018, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its affiliates. All rights reserved.
Kadir Rathnavelu
rathnave@amazon.com

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