Ladders has found that Twilio SendGrid “just works”

Ladders is the go-to job site for more than 7 million job-seekers and over 86,000 employers and recruiters. While they started more than 11 years ago as a job site focused on positions earning $100,000/year or more, Ladders now helps professional of all types find new positions.

In order to keep up with their email communication requirements, Ladders began by creating an in-house email infrastructure. Unfortunately, this solution wasn’t scalable and required valuable time and resources. Ladders knew they needed an email engine that would be flexible and provide the personalization they needed to successfully deliver their email.

Ladders moved to a full marketing communications suite to handle their email, and while this solution provided a lot of bells and whistles, it didn’t provide what they really needed: reliability, flexibility, and cost-effective scalability.

Ladders’ engineering team led the charge to find the best email service provider (ESP) for their company, and they turned to Twilio SendGrid. Matt Chesler, DevOps Architect at Ladders says “Twilio SendGrid’s APIs are very well documented and complete. We’ve been able to build exactly what we want on top of their email platform.”

Ladders now uses Twilio SendGrid as their delivery engine to send over 170 million transactional emails, newsletters, and other types of marketing emails to their 7 million users every month.

A unique situation

As a job site, Ladders faces unique problems and requirements for their email program. Because high engagement with users who are actively seeking new positions drives their business, they need to provide highly-personalized email content. Twilio SendGrid’s APIs and webhooks allow Ladders to send custom emails based on things like:

  • Location
  • Job title
  • Goals
  • Salary

Twilio SendGrid is an ideal email solution for Ladders because our email deliverability platform is built for scaling companies with a large (and growing) user base. Marketing Manager at Ladders, Paige Tintle, says, “We’re confident that our critical email campaigns are going to be sent every single time with Twilio SendGrid’s simple, but very sophisticated capabilities.”

An email-focused feature set

When Ladders switched to a full-service marketing tool from their in-house email solution, they discovered that they were paying for a lot of features they weren’t using and didn’t need. Twilio SendGrid solved that problem by providing a robust email solution that offers a few key features to effectively send customized email:

  • Subusers and Dedicated IPs
    By segmenting the types of email they send, Ladders is able to use subuser accounts and dedicated IPs to ensure they have the highest deliverability and engagement rates possible.
  • Event Webhook
    Ladders uses Twilio SendGrid’s Event Webhook to retrieve engagement data every time email is sent. With the Event Webhook, they’re able to see which of their users open, click, or even unsubscribe.
  • Technical Account Management
    As a high-volume sender, Ladders also has an expert Technical Account Manager who monitors their sending and deliverability to help ensure that their emails are reaching recipient inboxes.
  • Documentation
    Twilio SendGrid values transparency, and provides world-class documentation for all of our products and features. This means that Ladders’ engineers can dive into our resources to learn exactly how their email is being handled.

Ultimately, a successful email program is essential for any growing business. While it’s difficult to associate their email with a specific monetary impact, Ladders knows that email delivery and engagement drives traffic to their site, which in turn drives sales, account upgrades, and other types of revenue.

By using Twilio SendGrid, Ladders has been able to set up their email program and throw everything they have at it without any issues because according to them, “Twilio SendGrid just works.” To learn more about transactional and marketing email solutions, visit SendGrid's Email Solutions. You can also learn more about Ladders by visiting their homepage.


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