An Australian real estate platform sending 1.2 million property alert emails daily was experiencing 31% spam placement at Outlook and 24% at Gmail. Buyer engagement with property alerts had declined from 22% click rate to 8% over 18 months. The platform was sending all alerts to all subscribers regardless of engagement or listing relevance.
The platform had accumulated 4.1 million email subscribers but only 820,000 had clicked any email in the past 90 days. The 3.28 million inactive subscribers were generating near-zero engagement, creating a persistently negative signal that degraded inbox placement for all subscribers. Complaint rates were running at 0.12% due to irrelevant alert emails to users who had already purchased or abandoned their search.
SolutionWe implemented engagement-based segmentation with dedicated infrastructure. Active searchers were moved to dedicated IPs with high-priority sending. Inactive subscribers underwent a three-stage re-engagement campaign; non-responders were suppressed. Alert relevance matching was tightened to require minimum 70% criteria match before sending.
Results"Sending fewer, more relevant emails to fewer people generated dramatically more leads. The deliverability fix and the product improvement were the same change."
— CPO, Real Estate PlatformReal estate platforms are particularly prone to list accumulation beyond useful engagement. Segmenting by active search behavior and suppressing dormant subscribers is both a deliverability intervention and a product improvement.
