Case Study · emaildeliverability.com

Deliverability, built intothe editors marketersalready work in.

EmailDeliverability.com is the deliverability software of EmailMarketing.com, Troy Ericson's group. We built the product: a Chrome extension that optimizes an email for inbox placement from inside the marketer's own ESP editor, across 40+ platforms, and the admin system behind it that carries users, subscriptions, licensing and error triage.

ESPs supported: 40+ESPs supported
Businesses on the software: 640+Businesses on the software
Generated for their clients: $250M+Generated for their clients

Engagement Overview

EmailDeliverability.com sells the one thing every email marketer needs and almost none of them can engineer: getting the message into the inbox rather than the promotions tab or the spam folder. It is used by 640+ businesses, and the group behind it, which also owns EmailMarketing.com and MailGenius, has published more than $250M generated for its clients through email. Placement is the product.

We are the engineering team behind it. Nortik is the group’s core technology and AI team, eight engineers across three products, two of them on this one: a Chrome extension that optimizes an email inside whichever platform the marketer already sends from, and the admin system that carries the users, subscriptions, licences and error triage behind it. Both were built from scratch and both are still ours to run.

The delivery mechanism is the whole idea. A deliverability tool that asks a marketer to export a campaign, run it through something else and paste it back is a tool nobody opens twice. So the product had to live where the work already happens, inside the ESP’s own editor, as one panel and one click, which is an engineering problem rather than a deliverability one. That problem is what this study is about.

40+
ESPs supported: 640+
Businesses on the software: $250M+
Generated for their clients

Engagement: Team as a Service
Team: 2 AI Engineers
Focus: Email deliverability platform development
Working model: Owned delivery

Stack

Extension & frontend

Chrome Extension APIs
React
TypeScript
JavaScript
Astro
TailwindCSS
HTML / CSS

Services

Node.js
Express
BullMQ
Python

Data & storage

PostgreSQL
SQLite
Redis

Infrastructure & DevOps

OVH dedicated bare metal
Terraform
Ansible
Docker
Caddy
Let’s Encrypt
GitHub

Integrations

Gmail API
GoHighLevel
Cloudflare
Discord & Slack webhooks

A laptop screen at a steep angle showing a document being marked up, the keyboard in the foreground

The Challenge

One product had to work across dozens of email marketing platforms, and no two of them build an email the same way. Klaviyo, HubSpot, Mailchimp, Keap, ActiveCampaign and the rest each ship their own editor with their own markup, their own save path and their own idea of what a template is. The marketer sees one button. Underneath it, every platform is a different program.

And none of it holds still. Chrome ships every few weeks, the platforms redesign their editors on their own schedules, and an extension that reaches into an interface it does not own breaks the day either one moves. Continuous maintenance is not a phase of this project, it is the shape of it. The extension also had to stay light and reliable, because it runs inside somebody else’s application and gets blamed for anything that happens there.

The commercial half was just as real. Hundreds of businesses were going to be on this, each with their own people, their own accounts and their own subscription, and none of that could live in a spreadsheet or in the extension itself. User management and licensing had to be centralised somewhere the group’s own operators could work, which meant a platform behind the product, not just a product.

The Solution

Two pieces of software, built to feel like one. A Chrome extension that puts a single button inside 40+ email platforms, and an admin system that turns that button into a product hundreds of businesses can be sold, licensed and supported on.

The EmailDeliverability.com extension panel in both states side by side: blue with Click To Optimize, and green with Optimization is active

One panel, one click, inside the editor

The whole product surfaces as a single panel docked beside the email the marketer is already writing. Pick the client, pick the business, press once, and the extension rewrites the message for inbox placement in place. The two frames here are the entire interaction: blue and Click To Optimize before, green and Optimization is active after, with a click to take it back off again. Everything else on this page exists so that this stays a button.

Chrome Extension
In-Editor Panel
One-Click Optimize
Reversible

An account record in the admin platform listing the supported ESPs, from ActiveCampaign and Klaviyo through to MailerLite and FunnelKit, above the account's optimized email count and software health

A reusable integration layer, not a pile of one-off fixes

Supporting a platform means knowing how its editor stores an email and how to hand it back changed, and the tempting version of that is one bespoke patch per platform. We built the other version: a shared integration layer with the platform-specific parts isolated behind it, so a new ESP is an adapter rather than a fork. It is why the roster kept growing. ActiveCampaign, Klaviyo, HubSpot, Mailchimp, Keap, Brevo, ConstantContact, GetResponse, Sendgrid, Omnisend, MailerLite, Kit, Beehiiv, Drip, Ontraport, Kartra, Kajabi, Shopify, Outlook and Gmail are all on it, and the frame here is that list on one account record.

Modular Adapters
40+ Platforms
Per-Account Entitlements
Fast to Extend

The EmailDeliverability user management screen listing team members with their roles and per-product access, names and addresses redacted

The platform the product is actually sold from

Behind the extension is an admin system the group runs its business on. Every account, who registered it, which ESPs it is entitled to, how many emails it has optimized, what version of the software it is on and when it last succeeded or failed. Team members carry roles and per-product access, so an operator can be given the deliverability software and not the rest. Licensing and subscriptions live here rather than in the extension, which is what let hundreds of businesses onto one product without the support load scaling with them.

User Management
Roles & Access
Subscriptions & Licensing
Per-Account Software Health

The admin platform's error logger listing failures by ID, error type, ESP and status, with Kit, HubSpot, Kajabi, Keap, Brevo and Drip among the platforms

Breakage arrives as a queue, not as a support ticket

An extension that reaches into interfaces it does not own will break, so the platform was built to find out first. Failures are reported back with the platform that produced them and what the extension was trying to do, and land in an error log that can be filtered, exported and worked through: Kit could not add an element, HubSpot could not remove one, Keap changed under a save. That is the difference between learning an editor moved from a queue on Monday morning and learning it from a customer. The same panel also carries InboxPro stats, because the group runs both products and its operators only want one login.

Error Logger
Classified by ESP
CSV Export
InboxPro Stats

And the decisions underneath it

A browser extension is easy to ship once and hard to keep alive for years across platforms that never stop changing. Six of the choices on this engagement were made for the second problem rather than the first.

Modular architecture, paid back per integration
The reusable layer was the expensive decision at the start and the cheap one ever since. New ESP support went from a project to a task, which is the single reason the roster kept growing past forty without the maintenance bill growing with it.
Maintenance as a standing job
Chrome updates and editor redesigns are treated as expected events rather than incidents. The version each account is running is on its record, so when a platform moves, who is exposed and who has already picked up the fix are both things you look at.
Light enough to be forgotten
The extension shares a tab with an application it does not own, and the fastest way to lose a marketer is to make their editor feel slow. Keeping the footprint small was a product requirement, not an optimisation pass at the end.
One panel over two products
The admin system carries InboxPro stats beside the deliverability software and the cold email bot. The group sells more than one thing and its operators sign into one place, which is what makes us the account's platform team rather than one project's vendor.
Entitlements the operators set themselves
Which ESPs an account can use, which products a team member can reach, and whether the account is active are fields somebody at the client can change. Onboarding a business does not route through us, which is what a product needs and a project usually is not.
Owned infrastructure under it
The platform runs on the group's own OVH bare metal alongside the rest of the account's estate, provisioned with Terraform and Ansible and fronted by Caddy and Cloudflare. Same hardware, same posture, same team as the sending tier.

The Nortik engineering floor in Novi Sad, a room of engineers at work across a row of desks

Business Impact

The platform became the foundation for thousands of optimization actions performed by users across the supported email platforms, and it is still growing. Marketers who could not tell you what an authentication header is get better placement out of the tool they were already working in, which is the only version of this product that was ever going to be used. The extension and the dashboard behind it continue to evolve.

What made that possible is the choice the team is proudest of, and it is an architectural one rather than a feature. Writing reusable integrations instead of one-off fixes cost more at the start and has paid for itself with every platform added since: new ESP support became fast enough to be routine, and the editors that change underneath us are absorbed in one place rather than in forty.

For the group it is the difference between selling deliverability as a service and selling it as software. And it does not stand on its own: the same admin panel carries InboxPro, the sending platform we built for the same account and run on the same hardware. One engineering team behind the product a customer clicks and the infrastructure their mail actually leaves on.