How Shopify helps merchants build customer relationships with Twilio SendGrid

Helping merchants build customer relationships

Providing a stellar customer experience is at the heart of how Shopify helps retailers manage their businesses. Shopify offers merchants a suite of services including online store setup, branding, point of sales systems, and customer engagement tools to simplify the process of running a store. 

A reliable email service is an essential tool to build lasting customer relationships. With Shopify’s email platform, merchants can deliver transactional notifications surrounding orders or reach customers with email marketing to showcase their brand and products.

Shopify’s email infrastructure needed to scale quickly to support email marketing. As more merchants explored promotional marketing, it became key to proactively manage sending reputation. Merchants needed the ability to send from their own domains to prevent deliverability issues, which can make or break growing email programs.

Simplifying the merchant experience

The commerce platform has simplified the merchant’s email experience from beginning to end. A long requested feature from merchants, Twilio SendGrid’s DomainKeys Identified Mail (DKIM) signing gets shop owners up and running faster after they purchase domains through Shopify. Additionally, at the scale and frequency Shopify adds IPs, SendGrid’s IP pool management has streamlined the IP warmup process, protecting merchants’ sending reputation for their most important emails.

“SendGrid streamlines our processes with its custom mailbox relay, deliverability optimization with automated retries in response to mailbox error codes, and connection management. When we receive webhooks from SendGrid, bounces are labeled properly and parsed. All of that information is ready for us already, we don’t have to figure it out, SendGrid just handles it for us,” said Sébastien Lavoie, Shopify’s Notification Platform Development Manager.

As merchants send campaigns, Shopify receives aggregate event data from SendGrid webhooks and the Courier platform customizes key email stats for merchant dashboards. Dashboards feature email delivery and open rate reports alongside shop sales data to help merchants refine their email campaigns over time.

Providing the right context

Shopify partners with SendGrid’s Expert Services team to sharpen its email deliverability strategy. Shopify’s in-house team of email specialists leverages this partnership along with internal tools to easily onboard merchants and offer cutting-edge deliverability expertise. The team monitors details like IP pools, bounce suppressions, and opt-outs, sifting through the information to reveal larger deliverability trends. Without taking the time to analyze the data and process it into digestible content, something as trivial as an email bounce could inundate merchants with a sea of information. Wielding SendGrid’s deliverability expertise, the specialists provide merchants with the context they need to make adjustments to their email program. Shopify’s delivery rates perform well-above industry average, with a 99.5% overall delivered rate, 91.3% inbox placement rate, and less than 4 sec p90 average delivery time on all transactional emails

“There are a ton of subtleties with email delivery that are hard to grasp just by doing your own research. There’s a rabbit hole of information,” said Lavoie. “It starts easy, but when everything collides with each other, that’s when you need your expert. Having access to SendGrid’s deliverability experts has helped us learn everything from DKIM, DMARC, to SPF and how they interact.”

Creatively building upon flexible APIs

Shopify’s email infrastructure team has no shortage of creativity when it comes to building dynamic email features upon Twilio SendGrid’s flexible Email API. Whether that’s creating email resiliency to overcome issues like inbox outages, or enabling merchants to vault past bounce suppression hurdles, Shopify creatively builds in service of delivering exceptional customer experience.