Turkey’s Largest Food Delivery Website Relies on StrongMail’s Email Marketing Platform to Reduce Costs While Growing Its Business

StrongMail has been selected by Turkey’s biggest online food delivery portal, Yemeksepeti (translation: food basket), to power the delivery and management of its marketing and transactional email.

The Yemeksepeti website allows customers to place food orders with 3,500 partner restaurants in 12 Turkish cities and includes many global brands such as Domino’s Pizza, McDonalds and Wagamama. The website currently receives around 500,000 orders every month. Yemeksepeti confirms each order instantly by email and the restaurant then prepares and delivers the food, often within a matter of minutes. In addition, Yemeksepeti currently emails more than 1.5 million special promotions to its customers each month.

Yemeksepeti’s biggest problem was a direct result of its own success. It had been using an email service provider (ESP) that charged fees based on the volume of emails being sent. As the business grew, the volume of emails also grew. This resulted in continually higher ESP fees that would keep rising steeply if the business kept on its impressive growth trajectory.

Seeking to lower the cost of its email business, Yemeksepeti evaluated a number of email service providers (ESP) before deciding to bring the service in-house by integrating StrongMail Message Studio and StrongMail Transactional Email Platform into the company’s existing e-commerce platform.

When compared to the previous ESP-based approach, Yemeksepeti expects to recoup 80 percent of its one-time investment in StrongMail within the first year. Beyond that point, the cost benefits continue to climb, as Melih Ödemiş, Yemeksepeti founder and Head of IT, explains: “The more emails we sent with the old ESP, the greater our costs were becoming. With StrongMail, aside from a small maintenance fee, we can now eliminate costly CPM fees and concentrate on growing our business.”

Other benefits of the StrongMail platform, cited by Ödemiş, include personalised mailing, a critical feature for Yemeksepeti since its customers need to be kept updated on special offers from their local restaurants. In addition, Yemeksepeti has been able to develop an online reputation in its own right. Ödemiş said: “With StrongMail, we were able to start with a clean slate and build up our own reputation based purely on our own email campaigns. This has led to higher deliverability rates and, ultimately, more successful campaigns.”

Paul Bates, UK Managing Director for StrongMail, concluded: “Any growing online business currently relying on ESPs to manage its transactional and marketing email campaigns stand to benefit from StrongMail’s in-house platform that lets them manage growing email volumes more effectively, while driving down the overall cost.”

About Yemeksepeti

Yemeksepeti began trading in 2001 and now has 95% market share in its sector. With 600,000 subscribers already registered, the company works with 3,500 restaurants across 12 cities in Turkey, and has plans to extend its business into the rest of the country and beyond.

About StrongMail Systems, Inc.

StrongMail’s online marketing solutions for email and social media enable businesses to reach, engage and influence their target audience using the most powerful channels available to marketers today. StrongMail gives email marketers the control and support they need to improve campaign performance, boost deliverability and lower costs, while also leveraging the power of social media to extend the reach of their campaigns and brand to new audiences. Combining an easy-to-use email marketing application, high-performance delivery system, viral-marketing tool, social media integration, and a wide range of deliverability, strategic and supporting services, StrongMail makes it possible for companies with all levels of resources and expertise to take advantage of its proven solutions. Headquartered in Redwood City, CA, StrongMail’s clients include global leaders across virtually every industry. To learn more about StrongMail, please visit www.strongmail.com or follow us online at www.twitter.com/StrongMail or www.facebook.com/StrongMail.