Ask IH: What are your pain points with transactional or marketing emails?
Hi, fellow indie hackers,
After a few failed projects I have a new idea related to email. I'm working on a landing page and would love to get some early feedback already. I'd really appreciate it if some of you could answer my following questions:
What are your paint points with transactional or marketing emails? If you have any: How do you currently solve them?
I'm happy to share my idea (and the landing page when it's ready) with you but I'm afraid to get biased answers here if I write it here already.
Thanks a lot in advance :-)
Translations are annoying. You always have separate templates for each language
Thanks for your comment!
Marketing emails is a numbers game - most end up in spam folder, i.e. the reachability index and open rate is low.
Most marketing emails appear to be click-baits with heavily personalized titles and content
Google does an excellent job of classifying marketing emails as spam
Transactional emails also end up in spam folders
email marketing is heavily abused.
Thanks a lot for your comment! These points are all touching deliverability, right? That's a huge topic of course. But also quite complicated I guess.
Out of interest: Did you have any issues regarding templating workflow?
I have delivered NPS products at CustomerSat and MarketTools where customers like Apple, Yahoo, SAP, Business Objects, AMD, and 8000 more sent web customer satisfaction surveys to customers so we could collect attitudinal data and combine with known attributes of users. We generated the emails using templates and used all tricks like IP priming, personalization, numerous IPs, separate domains and subdomains, SPF, reputation management, policy compliance, distributed schedules, bounce management, and blacklist management.
The biggest problem was not templates or workflow, it was reachability (or deliverability). Yahoo, Gmail, Hotmail, and others changed the policy all the time and we had to resort to different tricks on the fly. It felt like pushing a product uphill and we were not even using drip campaigns.
I feel now it is easier to use third party solutions like sendgrid, mailchimp, drip, hubspot, or numerous under https://segment.com/catalog (click on "Email marketing" under categories)
I recommend reading #9 in this series https://twitter.com/DickeySingh/status/1047005528793264128
Wow, great series! I'll have a look at the references one by one. Great hint to look at segment.com as well.