Welcome to the April Newsletter.
This month we share some helpful resources to make your transactional emails more effective, as well as a bunch of new content on our site to help you get the most out of Postmark. We hope you enjoy this month’s issue!
|
|
📰 Industry news and useful tools
The Litmus team gives a good overview of what structured data is, and how to use it to improve the email experience for your recipients:
An example of structured data in the inbox is the context box you see above emails like flight and event confirmations. These boxes are largely populated by structured data using formats dictated by Schema.org, an open source project that aims to make structured data easier to use. The goal is to provide additional context for subscribers so that they can more readily get what they need out of an email.
One of our guest writers Kristen DeCosta shares some excellent advice on how to make your transactional email sound more human and relatable. First things first:
While online businesses generally thrive on consistent, open-ended communication, transactional emails require a specific, nuanced approach. In a nutshell: if you don't absolutely need to bother your customer with a transactional email, don’t. For example, pre-dunning, or sending emails warning customers before a card expires, is an archaic tactic that will likely frustrate your users.
Laura Atkins on the challenges of getting to the bottom of delivery issues when you send one-to-one messages:
“Why did this actual, real, one-to-one message go to spam?” is a question we can almost never answer. Sure, sometimes a domain reputation is bad enough or the message is in the wrong language or there’s something blindingly obvious with the content that makes it clear why the message went to spam. But those cases are not as common as we may like. Sometimes the filters just decide this mail should be delivered there.
|
🎨 What we’ve been working on
We know how important our status page is to you. We’re happy to say that we just rolled out some updates to increase the granularity of the information on the page even more. You can now see the status of each service individually, as opposed to a single status indicator. You can also drill down to see the average response time of each service, as well as a list of previous incidents.
Also, a reminder that you can sign up to get email alerts for any incidents at the bottom of the status page.
|
|
Video content is a bit of a polarizing topic… Some people love it, others maintain they will never watch video tutorials. But we want to serve all tastes here at Postmark, so we’re happy to announce our brand new page dedicated to helpful videos.
|
|
These videos are all short and meant to get you on your way as quickly and effectively as possible. To get a feel for it, start with some of our newest videos: How to Parse Inbound Messages and Inbound Domain Forwarding, or this quick tip to answer the question Why did that message bounce?
We just completed our most successful webinar yet, and it’s now available on the site for anyone who missed it. Unlike sending IPs that can be switched from time to time, your domain reputation sticks with you as a sender. This is why mailbox providers are investing in filtering protocols that put more weight on domain reputation to determine whether emails should make it through to the inbox.
If you’re not familiar with how your sending practices and domain reputation impact deliverability this webinar will get you up-to-speed with everything you need to know.
|
|
📮 Rebound: Notify your customers about email delivery issues
|
|
Have you tried Rebound yet? It’s our free tool that lets you prompt your customers to update their email address if an email you sent them hard bounced.
Setup is quick and easy. You customize Rebound’s notification and embed the javascript snippet in your app. As customers use your web app, Rebound checks whether their email address was marked inactive from a hard bounce. If the email address is inactive, Rebound will show a notification on your app asking them to update their email. Check it out!
|
Until next month — happy sending!
The Postmark Team
|
Too many emails?
Unsubscribe 😢
|
|