2012 February
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Customer Success: Gowalla Teams with SendGrid to Strengthen Their Business
78 days ago by Carly Brantz
Gowalla is a socially curated travel guide that helps users keep up with their friends and share their favorite places. Gowalla uses email delivery notifications and friend requests to their users so these emails need to arrive in the inbox on time and as expected. However, Gowalla started to experience email delivery failures that could not be resolved by their email provider. Their email delivery rates went down and they had zero visibility into their overall email metrics. They decided they need to make a change. read more -
Why Response Metrics Matter
80 days ago by Carly Brantz
While we often focus on delivered rates when talking about email deliverability, response metrics will soon be equally important in determining whether or not your email arrives. ISPs are increasingly looking at subscriber engagement levels to determine the validity of your email messages. While not all ISPs are using engagement data and those that are all have different criteria, the fact is that opens, clicks and other engagement metrics are now playing a role in delivery decisions.ISPs are expanding their measurement criteria because they want to confirm that your subscribers are real and active. If a subscriber logins and interacts with messages in their inbox, they are considered active users. The opposite behavior might mean that there are large numbers of inactive subscribers and therefore, standard reputation metrics may not be the best indicator of message value. Data on opens and clicks provide a more complete picture of the sender and it’s subscriber relationships. So if you’ve been laser-focused on deliverability numbers, now is the time to expand your view. read more
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Customer Success: SendGrid Becomes the Mayor of foursquare
85 days ago by Carly Brantz
If you’re familiar with location based services, then you are most certainly aware of foursquare – the mobile platform that makes cities easier to use and more interesting to explore. At SendGrid we are caught up in the craze and quite competitive internally for our foursquare points and mayorships. While most communication between foursquare users happens within the application, email alerts, friend requests, check ins, and “mayorship” status result in over 60 million transactional emails sent per month. read more -
SendGrid’s First In-House Mobile Hackathon
85 days ago by Elmer ThomasBy all accounts, the first ever SendGrid hosted hackathon was a fantastic success! Both for our team here at SendGrid and those who came to hack with us. As a result, we will definitely hold more hackathons here at our office in Anaheim, locally in Orange County and in other cities around the country.
Before I recap the event, I’d like to give thanks to some of the key people who helped make this hackathon a success. Penny, our office manager at SendGrid, was instrumental in making sure all of the logistics were in order, from initial planning to organizing our workspaces to the “unofficial” after party. Thanks to Tom, our former VP of Engineering for attending the entire event and helping with the final judging.
Special thanks goes out to our wonderful sponsors Heroku and IOGEAR who delighted hackathon winners with awesome prizes. And to all of the attendees, both SendGrid employees and visitors, who made this event fun, educational and entertaining.
Now, on to the good stuff …
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Does SEM Affect Deliverability?
87 days ago by Tim FallsWith all the emphasis being placed on search engine marketing, one question remains unanswered. Does search engine marketing (SEM) affect email deliverability? While there may not be a direct correlation between email and SEM, there are cross channel implications that you need to consider since the goal of most online marketing efforts is to engage in an email exchange that will lead to customer relationship.
Your SEM efforts typically will drive visitors to a landing page or your website. From there your goal is to convert these visitors into subscribers and ultimately, customers. In each case, you are attempting to develop a relationship with that visitor to engage with your brand for an extended period of time. Whether you are asking the visitor to subscribe to your email list or complete a sale, you will be collecting data that can be used to for your promotional email efforts or subsequent transactional email messages. In either case, you need to follow sound email practices to ensure the people who end up on your list want to receive your email messages. Here are few tips to help bridge the gap between email and SEM. read more
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A Startup Weekend for the record books: the SLC community is fo realz
89 days ago by Tim Falls
A few weeks ago, I took a tiny plane over the Rockies to Salt Lake City to attend our first Startup Weekend as Global Sponsors. Our good pal (and loyal customer), Al Doan, was the local organizer of @SWSaltLake, and he did an amazing job facilitating the first ever SW for the SLC startup community.
When Al moved to SLC a few months ago, he set out to play a role in strengthening the community. He noticed an untapped potential, given the plethora of talented, intelligent people that seemed to be missing a venue in which they could express themselves and create new things. People told him that a Startup Weekend couldn’t happen – “No one will come out on Sunday” … “It’s been tried before, and it failed,” he was told.
Al wasn’t convinced, and as it turns out, the community was right there with him. Personally, as soon as I found out that Al was behind the effort to bring Startup Weekend to a new city, I was committed, and thus, so was SendGrid. read more
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Use Your Transactional Messages to Market Your App
90 days ago by Carly BrantzTransactional messages yield the highest open rates of all email. Why? It’s because your subscribers expect to receive them in the form of notices, confirmations and receipts. Smart senders can maximize this opportunity to incorporate relevant marketing messages into their transactional messages to deepen the relationship with their customers.
According to Experian’s Transactional Email Report, transactional email yields and average revenue per email that is two to five times greater than bulk email. They also have exceptionally high click through and open rates as subscribers tend to open them repeatedly. As a result, there is a prime opportunity to interact with this highly engaged audience through standard communications sent through your system. read more
