How ActivePipe solved email deliverability challenges with Sinch Mailgun

In 2022, MoxiWorks acquired email marketing platform ActivePipe. The automated email marketing platform for the real estate industry replaces cold calling, using engagement tracking and targeted campaigns to help agents identify hot leads. In that deal, MoxiWorks got a bonus: Sinch Mailgun. Its reliability and scalability now power the communications for more than 200,000 customers.  

That comprehensive and seamless offering has been hard won, explains Ernie Joseph, Director of Technology Operations at MoxiWorks. He remembers a time when the deliverability of emails was starting to bottleneck growth – or even send it backwards.  

“We had customers who were constantly having deliverability issues and were ready to walk out the door – some did walk out the door.” 

Today, ActivePipe’s robust infrastructure and email deliverability capabilities serve as the foundational codebase for RISE – a platform bringing together a website builder, advertising tools and CMA presentation capabilities with CRM.  

Ernie says the company hasn’t looked back.   

“It’s had a direct effect on things like our overall uptime for each product and means we can now focus on building out new products and modernising the architecture.”

Speak to anyone in the real estate industry, and they’ll tell you that it’s all about trust, relationships and communication. That’s why platforms like ActivePipe have become so critical to the industry – one email could be your next client or the final step in a successful deal.   

“If those emails aren’t getting through, there’s a legitimate transaction that could be missed,” says Ernie. 

The platform’s email infrastructure was becoming a thorn in Ernie’s side. All clients shared one of a handful of domains, which left everyone at the mercy of a couple of bad actors.  

“We’d say, ‘Please don’t spam people’ and then hope things work out.”  

Even one customer out of the tens of thousands could hurt a sender’s reputation, dropping deliverability and sparking those “always smouldering” reliability issues.  

“We’d have the panic of the team working on deliverability and reliability. The team was constantly in reactive mode, firefighting, and that would affect the whole organisation, starting with the customer.”  

Even with the whole team focused on troubleshooting, MoxiWork’s customers were still at risk of churn. It was also dampening morale.  

“Nobody likes being responsible for every bounce-back notification and deliverability issue.”  

Onboarding new customers was also time-consuming.  

“It could be a huge problem – there are just so many pain points we used to have in the past.”

To solve its deliverability issues and complex array of email sending platforms, MoxiWorks set about re-engineering the broader platform’s infrastructure to match ActivePipe. This consolidated the “many, many millions” of emails onto Mailgun and AWS Simple Email Services. This, says Ernie, saved the company in licensing fees while boosting deliverability.  

“It really came down to general reliability and ease of integration within our tool set,” he explains. “We’ve consolidated down, so we’re just paying for two services, with Sinch Mailgun being the primary. There was no point in using other services anymore, because Sinch Mailgun delivered everything.”  

The Mailgun API through ActivePipe also solved MoxiWorks’ onboarding nightmares. The developer-friendly setup made it straightforward for the team to build custom tools to make validation instant, and the whole experience “super easy” for developers and users.  

“We can set up and automate DKIM and DMARC records for deliverability right through Sinch Mailgun,” Ernie notes. “Now it’s a thousand times more efficient.”

Sinch Mailgun’s automated onboarding, rock-solid deliverability have helped to reduce operational overhead by 50% and support requirements by 20%.   

That, says Ernie, means his DevOps team now has the time and headspace to focus on the work that will move the company forward.   

“The way the team operates now is incredibly different from when I started five years ago,” says Ernie. “Not having to deal with [deliverability issues] is huge. We can be proactive, and that frees people up to do all kinds of things.” 

Since the shift, the team has retired the “archaic” on-premise servers and transitioned to a modern, cloud-based architecture. They’ve also launched RISE, which brings MoxiWorks services – including ActivePipe onto one platform. 

“Our support team loves the new setup, because it just makes their lives easier.” 

 The improvements have freed teams from reactive troubleshooting, allowing them to focus on product development and platform modernisation instead. 

Despite this far higher output, Ernie is also able to operate with a much leaner team, while improving uptime across its offerings to 99.99%. These organisation-wide efficiency gains could not have come sooner – MoxiWorks is growing, and fast. 

“As an organisation combined, we send a heck of a lot more emails than we ever did before.” 

But for Ernie, that growth is only manageable because of the team’s “massive leaps forward.” 

“We were struggling to just keep things running. Now, my job is to obsolete myself.”

What started as an acquisition of ActivePipe marked a massive shift in the way Ernie’s DevOps team works. Instead of a whack-a-mole of email issues, they can spend time building and improving the platform. By engineering the platform using Sinch Mailgun, they’ve automated much of the onboarding process, set the foundation for fast growth, and improved user experience across the board.  

For Ernie, email deliverability is now something he doesn’t have to think about.  

“Anytime I can know that the tools work and we don’t have to worry about it… life is good.” 

Discover how Sinch Mailgun can help your business improve deliverability and simplify email infrastructure, so you can get back to scaling.