Can you tell us a little bit about your experience and the work you do?
Prior to creating BestLocalReviews, we owned and operated the largest customer service training company in the United States. Our professional speakers presented over 3,000 seminars a year to businesses both large and small. The purpose of those live seminars was to help businesses develop great relationships with their customers and generate both sales and referrals.
When Google started allowing people to write reviews for businesses, we saw the opportunity to expand our customers’ reach by helping them create a positive online reputation on popular review sites. Getting online reviews quickly became the single most important marketing strategy a business could undertake.
We combined the two most important factors in getting great reviews and building your online reputation: providing great service and making it quick and easy for customers to get to where they needed to go to write a review. This simple idea gave birth to what is now, one of the most effective review gathering services in the country.
How are you using Postmark at BestLocalReviews today?
Before moving to Postmark, we constantly had to respond to customers wondering why an email was delivered to the spam box or why it took so long to be delivered. It was embarrassing and made us look like we didn't know what we were doing. You should never have to wait for or search spam boxes for a password reset or welcome email!
This wasn't unique to just one or two providers. We attempted to use six other email services before we found Postmark. All of the other services had the same issues. If you have to regularly check your email service’s IP address against known blacklists, you’re in for serious headaches.
Enter Postmark. We hesitantly made the switch to Postmark as we had been burned so many times before. We moved different types of transactional emails to the platform and began carefully watching for the results. Without a hitch, every single email type we moved to Postmark simply stopped having problems.
All emails were being delivered to the inbox instantly. After a few weeks we moved the rest of our transactional emails to Postmark and responding to email issues changed from being a daily issue to something we almost never think about.
Currently we use Postmark for all outgoing transactional email. We also utilize the 'bounce', 'spam complaint', and 'open' web hooks to notify our own customers of deliverability issues. This has drastically cut down on the number of tickets asking why an email wasn't received.
Having emails reach the inbox or having to wait for a message to be delivered is no longer a problem. Postmark does all the heavy lifting and we get to look really smart.
If you could add one feature to Postmark, what would it be?
An improved Gmail feedback loop would be useful. Knowing if we're upsetting the 800 lb. gorilla is always useful.
If you could give fellow developers one piece of advice about how to implement and manage their transactional email, what would it be?
Pay close attention to things like DMARC and DKIM (ed. note: we have a guide for that!), take spam complaints ridiculously seriously and never send someone an email who didn't ask for it.