New Standard Co lifts Ultra's email click rate 22% with Zaymo's Inbox Booster

By turning on Zaymo's Inbox Booster across Ultra's Klaviyo program, New Standard Co lifted click rate 22% and open rate 23%, measured against a holdout control and reported the same way Klaviyo counts opens.

Ultra is a subscription supplement brand, known for its Focus Pouches, managed by the retention team at New Standard Co. Like most subscription brands, Ultra runs acquisition on paid and asks email to carry retention, so the lifecycle program exists to keep good subscribers longer and lift their lifetime value. For that to work, the emails have to reach the inbox and earn a click.

Initial Problem

Ultra did not have a deliverability crisis. It had a ceiling. Depending on send timing and content, emails landed somewhere between the promotions tab and the primary inbox, which quietly capped how many subscribers ever saw them.

Inconsistent placement capped attention. An email in the promotions tab is an email fewer people open and act on. The reach was there, but the placement was not consistent enough to count on.
Open rate was not a number the team trusted. Privacy opens inflate open rate for every brand, so it was a poor read on whether the emails were actually working. New Standard Co treated it as a rough gauge, not a goal.
Clicks are what convert, and clicks depend on placement. The metric that turns into site visits and conversions is the click, and more consistent inbox placement was the most direct way to move it.

Open rate is a decent gauge of how emails are doing overall, but it is not what we optimize for. Privacy opens inflate it for everyone. What we actually care about is clicks, because that is what turns into traffic and conversions.

Hassan Ali Senior CRM Strategist, New Standard Co

Zaymo’s Solution

New Standard Co turned on Zaymo’s Inbox Booster across Ultra’s Klaviyo campaigns and flows, with one goal: get more of Ultra’s emails in front of subscribers so more of them click through.

Better inbox placement, more eyeballs. Inbox Booster improved how consistently Ultra’s emails reached the primary inbox, so more subscribers saw them and more of them acted.
Measured the way Klaviyo measures. Zaymo reports opens across every recipient, the same way Klaviyo counts them, rather than filtering down to the narrow, best-case segment that makes a lift look largest. The number is smaller than the filtered version other tools report, and it reconciles directly with what the team sees in their own reporting.
One system across campaigns and flows. The lift showed up wherever New Standard Co used the Booster, not just in a single campaign, which made it something they could rely on across the whole program.

Ultra's email program has two jobs: keep good subscribers longer and raise their lifetime value. Email has to carry retention, and getting our emails actually seen and acted on is upstream of every retention metric we care about.

Ankur Goyal CMO, Ultra

Setup

Ultra's Klaviyo email, sent with Zaymo's Inbox Booster

New Standard Co ran a controlled A/B test to isolate the effect of Inbox Booster on Ultra’s sends:

Control. A standard send, with no Booster treatment applied.
Variant. The same email, sent with Inbox Booster.

The offer, copy, and timing were held constant across both groups, so the only difference between them was the Booster. Because both groups were drawn from the same audience and sent at the same moment, seasonality, list health, and content quality all cancel out. That leaves inbox placement as the single variable in play, and the lifts below reflect that difference alone.

Running it this way meant the team could report the numbers without an asterisk. Every point of lift is attributable to the Booster and nothing else, which is exactly the kind of clean read a retention program needs before rolling a change out across the entire lifecycle.

Results

The number New Standard Co cared about was the click rate, and it moved across both campaigns and flows.

22% higher click rate, 5.0% vs 4.1% in control
23% higher open rate, 44.6% vs 36.4% in control, measured the way Klaviyo counts
~2.96M sends reached since Booster activation

Beyond the Booster, Ultra uses Zaymo across its lifecycle program. When the team wanted to test a Sleep Pouches add-on to its Focus subscribers, they ran the offer inside the email itself and landed roughly 180 add-on orders, a clean piece of net-new revenue from a single interactive send.

The lift we cared about showed up where it matters, more subscribers clicking through and, more importantly, taking action. And when we wanted to put a Sleep Pouches add-on in front of our Focus subscribers, we ran it right inside the email and it landed. That's the kind of email strategy that compounds on lifetime value.

Ankur Goyal CMO, Ultra

Takeaways

For a subscription brand, the temptation is to chase open rate. Ultra and New Standard Co did the opposite. They treated open rate as the inflated, privacy-padded number it is, and optimized for the click, because the click is what turns into a site visit, a conversion, and another month of subscription.

Inbox Booster moved that number by solving an unglamorous problem: getting more of the right emails into the primary inbox, consistently, so the rest of the lifecycle program had a larger audience to work on. Reported honestly, against a real control and the way Klaviyo counts, the lift is one the team can point to without a footnote.