24% More Opens: Inside redBus and Netcore’s Email Visibility Play

Founded in 2006 and headquartered in Bangalore, redBus is India’s largest online bus ticketing platform, connecting travellers to thousands of operators across India, Malaysia, Indonesia, Singapore, Peru, Colombia, Vietnam and Cambodia. It holds roughly 70% of India’s online bus-ticketing market, has served over 56 million travellers since launch, and sits inside the MakeMyTrip Group while leading bus ticketing as a category in its own right.

That scale is what makes inbox placement a different problem here than it is for a standard e-commerce brand. A promotional send landing late costs a click. A departure update landing where the traveller never looks costs them the bus. Running thousands of routes and operators means leaning on automated lifecycle email at volume, which turns visibility from an optimisation lever into a reliability requirement.

A large share of redBus’s lifecycle email was landing in Gmail’s Promotions tab rather than the Primary inbox – buried, in practice, since that isn’t where travellers look first. The campaigns themselves were strong. What wasn’t keeping pace was their visibility: Gmail’s classifier wasn’t reading the relevance and engagement signals around those sent the way the content warranted, so fewer travellers saw the email in time to act on it.

The baseline carried the same story. Before any changes, the programme was opening at 22.00% with a 0.03% click rate on delivered email – below what its reach and relevance supported. Both teams agreed to go after the cause rather than patch around it.

Netcore’s Inbox Visibility Optimization – NIVO – programme was built for this exact visibility issue. Rather than applying a single fix, the two teams executed a four-stage rollout.

Diagnosis came first – an audit of redBus’s send patterns, engagement signals, and content structures to isolate what pushed Gmail’s classifier toward the Promotions tab. From there, both teams re-engineered the underlying signals. Tuning the NIVO algorithm to redBus’s specific sending domains, cleaning up list hygiene, and refining content signals fed better data into Gmail’s classification model. NIVO then went live in phases from late November 2025, giving both teams space to evaluate performance at each step before expanding.

Optimization continued long past go-live. Netcore and redBus tracked visibility and engagement as each phase progressed, adjusting the algorithm based on live performance data. The audience stayed the same; what changed was how clearly Gmail recognized the urgency of the sends.

The shift showed up quickly and sustained over time. Open rates moved from 22.00% to 27.26% on delivered email – 1.25 times higher than before – while click rates went from 0.03% to 0.07%, a 2.33X increase.

The shape of the curve mattered as much as the metrics. Both figures climbed steadily across the following months rather than spiking and fading – proof that the fix was structural. A one-time bump points to a strong campaign or a seasonal peak. A sustained climb across a phased rollout points to systemic reach restored.

For a platform whose communication carries real travel logistics, that translates directly into travellers seeing critical updates when it counts. Not a better-looking dashboard – a boarding point arriving before the bus does.