How Lyris ListManager & Lyris Professional Services helped Pumpkin Patch, AU & NZ’s leading retailer of fashionable children's wear to optimize email deliverability. Visit http://lyris.co.uk/clients/customer-success-stories to see how over 5,000 organizations worldwide use our solutions to design, automate and optimize data-driven digital marketing programs.

1. About Pumpkin Patch
Established in 1990, Pumpkin Patch has built an enviable reputation throughout
New Zealand and Australia as a leading retailer of fashionable children’s wear, and is
becoming increasingly recognized internationally. With more than 2,000 employees,
190 stores, and wholesale operations in 24 markets globally, the Patch brand can
also be found in selected countries across Asia and the Middle East, and has stand-
alone fully-branded websites in the U.K., U.S., and Ireland, as well as wholesale
operations in the U.K. and U.S.
Business Challenge
Pumpkin Patch has traditionally utilized three main sales routes to market – its
stores, mail order, and ecommerce. As the use of online channels grew in popularity
with its customers, email became an important part of the overall marketing
program for Pumpkin Patch, and delivering email messages successfully to its
growing customer database became a top priority. When email deliverability rates
began to drop, from 99% to around 85%, Pumpkin Patch turned to Lyris Professional
Services for assistance.
The Solution
Lyris’ deliverability experts looked closely at the company’s business goals,
processes, and systems to uncover practices that may have negatively impacted
deliverability rates, and then developed strategies for improving them:
Pumpkin Patch Applies Continuous
Best Practices to Optimize Email
Deliverability
Headquarters
Auckland, New Zealand
URLs
www.pumpkinpatch.co.nz
www.pumpkinpatch.com.au
www.pumpkinpatchusa.com
www.pumpkinpatch.ie
www.pumpkinpatch.co.uk
www.charlieandmekids.co.nz
www.charlieandmekids.com.au
Industry
Children’s clothing manufacturer/distributor
Products & Services
Lyris ListManager
Lyris Professional Services
Results
Customer Success Story
98% average
deliverability rate
per list, up from 85%
2.2million emails
sent per week
Multiple IP addresses
for faster throughput
Action
• Review business goals and
expectations
• Review blocking issues with ISPs
• Segment the database
• Implement sending best practices
Objective
• Understand the operating
environment
• Unblock company IP addresses
• Create new mailstream IPs
• Improve deliverability and
conversion rates

2. Customer Success Story
“The deliverability services
provided by the Lyris
Professional Services team
have continually exceeded
our expectations over the
past 12 months. We are now
able to react much faster as
issues arise, allowing our email
marketing campaigns to have
maximum impact and reach.”
- Hannah Jones
Direct Campaign Administrator,
Pumpkin Patch
Action: Review Business Goals and Expectations
The first step initiated by Lyris Professional Services was to understand the
operational side of the two Pumpkin Patch marketing teams: the Marketing team
and the Direct team, which was charged with managing the ecommerce side of the
business. This allowed Lyris to identify those practices and processes that could be
affecting email deliverability rates, and offer strategies tailored specifically to the
company’s overall business objectives.
Strategy #1: Work with ISPs to Unblock IP Addresses
Improving deliverability rates required three steps related to blocking of email:
• First, discover why blocking was occurring with customers’ ISPs (Internet
Service Providers) as well as with the company’s own ISP.
• Second, rectify the practices that had led to the blockings in the first place.
• Third, reach out to the blocking ISPs and mitigate those blocks while also
obtaining more information about what had caused them.
Lyris learned that one of the main reasons for the blocking stemmed from poor list
hygiene, as a result of the size and age of the database. The original database had
been compiled many years previously from the mail order business and had grown
significantly as a result of digital marketing efforts.
The Lyris team worked closely with ISPs to get the Pumpkin Patch Internet Protocol
(IP) addresses unblocked, and developed strategies and identified best practices for
working with specific ISPs that were especially problematic. This work is ongoing,
with the team making the necessary small adjustments to practices and processes as
required, keeping deliverability rates at consistently high levels.
Strategy #2: Segment the Database
Because all Pumpkin Patch emails were being sent from one mailstream with an
IP address that had been blocked at various times, it was necessary to strategically
segment the database to avoid any future blocking issues. Lyris recommended
combining the two existing IPs, one each for the Charlie&me and Pumpkin Patch
brands, into the mailstream, which is a feature uniquely enabled by Lyris email
marketing technology. This balanced email volume over two addresses rather
than just the one and kept the volumes minimal on each IP, helping improve the
company’s sender reputation. More recently, in mid-2013, Lyris combined a third IP
address into the mailstream, which has further balanced volumes and built traffic.

3. www.lyris.com
Customer Success Story
Ready to Get Started?
Lyris’ Integrated Digital Marketing solution
extends the value of email through cross-channel
integration that can significantly increase
revenue and conversions of all digital marketing
programs, generate higher customer loyalty, and
increase the lifetime value of customers.
Benefits
• Drive revenue through behavioral retargeting
• Deliver a consistent customer experience
across digital touchpoints
• Achieve visibility across the entire
customer lifecycle
Capabilities
• Proven email engine with tens of billions of
messages sent
• Easy content creation and management
• Deliverability and reputation management
• Email reporting and analytics
• Mobile optimization and creative designs
• Advanced segmentation
• Automated testing
• List management
• Cross-channel campaign planning and
optimization
• Behavioral remarketing
• Integrated Web plus email analytics
• Real-time campaign revenue and
conversion tracking
• Embedded social features
• Dynamic content
• Hosted landing pages
• Hierarchical subaccounts
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January 2014 Copyright © 2014 Lyris, Inc. All rights reserved.
Strategy #3: Implement Sending Best Practices
In addition to segmenting the database, Lyris recommended scheduling email
sends in increments so that emails to the most active subscriber segments would
deploy first in order to help avoid riskier segments from being blocked later. Plus, by
utilizing an IP pool (rather than a single IP address) to distribute the larger volumes
of email, the company achieved higher deliverability rates.
Lyris also made enhancements to the Pumpkin Patch domain name system (DNS)
and a number of other infrastructure/security areas. Finally, Lyris helped educate
the Pumpkin Patch team in best sender practices and key points surrounding ISPs,
scheduling, and list hygiene.
The Results
Through the research, discovery, and implementation of processes initiated by
Lyris Professional Services over the last 12 months, Pumpkin Patch is now seeing
consistently high deliverability rates as well as an increase in click counts.
Through a combination of Pumpkin Patch’s digital strategy and Lyris’ professional
services activities, company management is crediting digital marketing for delivering
the highest return-on-investment (ROI) of any marketing effort now employed by
the company.