Welcome to the June Newsletter
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Hello ,
As a Postmark customer you’re probably a developer, bootstrapper, or entrepreneur who wants to build the best products for your customers. With that in mind, we decided to switch up our newsletters a little bit and try something different.
Instead of just sending you news about what we’ve been up to, we’re also going to start sharing the things our team likes to read in newsletters like this: interesting articles, advice for running and improving a business, profiles of people in the industry who do great things, etc.
So with that, welcome to our newsletter experiment. We hope you find it useful. Please let us know what you think!
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Industry news and useful tools
Email Subject Lines: 5 Tips to Attract Readers
The Nielsen-Norman Group has some pretty specific email guidelines based on the user research they’ve done:
Focus on the first 40 characters. Descriptive and well-written subject lines allow recipients to make an informed decision to get more details or move on.
Send Check It
This is a neat little tool that does one thing: it checks your emails for broken links before they go out. They promise to break what they call the “shame spiral of broken links”. Worth checking out!
How to Build a Best-in-Class Onboarding Experience
In this article Hiten Shah gives some advice on the best ways to onboard new customers in your app. Since he breaks it down by app type/industry, there’s sure to be something useful for everyone here.
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Transactional Email Best Practices.
Speaking of email guidelines, we have a pretty extensive guide on how to make the most of your transactional emails. If you haven’t done so already, check out our Transactional Email Best Practices.
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What we’ve been up to
New approval process
We were hunkered down in the first quarter working on a pretty big change for Postmark: moving to an approval process for new sign-ups. This obviously doesn’t affect our existing customers directly, but we did it because this approach has benefits for everyone — not just new sign-ups.
Our CTO Chris laid out the reasoning behind this change in his post All in for transactional email delivery:
As an infrastructure product, you rely on us to be fast and always available. And as an email service provider, we need to make sure that your email neighbors are sending emails of the absolute best quality. ESPs are unique in that they are only as good as the reputation and sending practices of their customers. A single bad actor can take down a good portion of an ESPs reputation, but it takes everyone as a whole to create an exceptional reputation over time.
In short, by manually vetting every new sign-up we’ll be able to make sure you are surrounded by good neighbors who send high quality emails. This will uphold our stellar IP reputation and make sure that we continue to provide you with the best deliverability in the industry.
In case you missed it
At the beginning of January we released one of our most-requested features: two-factor authentication. If you missed it at the time, check out our blog post about it.
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Meet Wes Bos
We’re really excited about using the Newsletter to profile some of our customers and share some email advice from them. In this month’s edition we present a brief profile of Wes Bos. Many of you will know him already, but let’s hear from him in his own words…
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Can you tell us a little bit about your experience and the work you do?
I create online video courses that help web developers learn new things and get better at their job. I've got a number of different free and premium courses that range from topics like CSS flexbox to building interfaces with React.
How are you using Postmark on projects today?
The platform that I use to handle signups, purchases, viewing of videos and user downloads is lovingly dubbed "BosMonster". The solution is entirely home grown and through it I sent a lot of transactional email. Anytime a user signs up for a course, requests a password reset or buys a package of stickers, the email is sent through Postmark.
If you could add one feature to Postmark, what would it be?
Honestly nothing - I'm coming here from other email sending services where I had absolutely no insights in what was happening to my emails. The Postmark dashboard is amazing as I can clearly see what is happening with all my email.
If you could give fellow developers one piece of advice about how to implement and manage their transactional email, what would it be?
As you probably know, the HTML and CSS behind email is a nightmare. Spend some time working on a good solution to compile your emails on the fly. I currently write my emails in Pug, which compiles to HTML. Then I use a package called Juice which will inline the CSS for me. It's a bit of work to get setup, but well worth it!
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Additional resources
You should definitely have a look at Wes’s excellent online courses. Also have a look at MailMason, our complete toolset to streamline building and updating a set of consistent transactional emails.
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Last word: from the #music channel
I’m sure we’re not the only team who has Slack channels devoted to things like music, coffee, books, and bikes. So here’s a couple of recommendations from our music channel.
Chris in customer success shared this amazing video of Norah Jones doing a cover of Black Hole Sun. And Jake on our development team shared Eric Bibb’s laid-back blues album Migration Blues, which is perfect for your afternoon work session.
Until next month, happy sending!
The Postmark Team
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