Turkey’s biggest online food delivery portal, Yemeksepeti (translation: food basket), has selected international e-marketing experts Strongmail 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 – as did the ESP fees.

Seeking to lower costs, Yemeksepeti has brought the service in-house by integrating StrongMail solutions into the company’s existing e-commerce platform. It expects to recoup 80 per cent of its investment within the first year.

Melih Ödemiş, Yemeksepeti founder and head of IT, said: “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.”

The StrongMail platform also includes personalised mailing, so customers can be updated on special offers from their local restaurants. Ödemiş added: “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, said: “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.”