The number everyone had learned to live with
Merchant communications at Uber Eats EMEA: 250,000 restaurants, 17 countries, over two million messages a month — onboarding, payouts, menu changes, incident notices. Global deliverability: ~84%.
84% reads like a solid B. In email it means one message in six does not exist — at this volume, three hundred thousand messages a month landing nowhere. A payout notice that never arrives is a support ticket; an onboarding email that never arrives is churn.
Underneath: ~2,000 automations accumulated across teams and regions, no intake process, no cross-region visibility, no single owner. Every dashboard reported sends and opens. No dashboard reported “never arrived.”
The question that reopened a settled number
My audits start with one question: what does the CFO see that the team doesn’t believe is true? The CFO saw “two million messages, 84% delivered.” The team saw list hygiene, IP reputation — normal at our scale. The honest version of the question was simpler: why are we okay with one in six not landing?
Nobody was un-okay with it, because the number had no owner. That is how deliverability decays everywhere: invisibly, politely, one percentage point at a time — and by the time bounce-rate creep shows up in a vanity dashboard, months of sends are already gone.
The diagnosis: the platform, not the list
First move: visibility. I built the first EMEA merchant CRM dashboard — SQL over the SFMC warehouse, one source of truth instead of per-team screenshots. With the actual delivery logs in one place, the failure pattern stopped looking like reputation: it did not follow list age, segment, or sending domain.
The trail ended at a platform-level SFMC defect — configuration, not content. No amount of list cleanup would have touched it. Hygiene work would have polished the list forever while the platform quietly dropped the mail.
The fix — and what it compounded into
The defect was escalated and fixed — and because it was platform-level, the fix shipped worldwide: EMEA, LATAM, US&CA, ANZ. Every market benefited, not just mine.
With mail actually arriving and the system finally visible, the rest was disciplined lifecycle work: an intake process that ended shadow campaigns, and A/B + AMPscript repairs on journeys that could now be measured honestly.
The numbers
ⓘ Verified in raw delivery logs, not platform vanity metrics. The one forecast below is labeled as a forecast.
The €25M is the incremental-impact forecast in the Merchant Education CRM strategy I co-authored — a forecast, not a booked result. Every other number above is a measured delta.
What this case is actually about
Deliverability is the quietest metric in the stack: it degrades invisibly, and teams reach for the explanation their tools can see — reputation, list quality, subject lines. When the platform itself is broken, all of that is cosmetics. The leak is always bigger than anything built on top of it.
“Oleks quickly became a valuable part of Uber, initiating scalable improvements that benefit the broader business well beyond a single market. He combines deep CRM systems expertise with a very pragmatic, business-first mindset.”
Ricardo Zertuche · Director of Marketing Technology, Uber
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