From heat waves to the Perseverance Rover touching down on Mars to the Ever Given blocking global trade routes for a minute there, 2021 sure kept us guessing!
Here at Dyspatch, we’re proud to share that after copious amounts of coffee, we’ve finally mastered screen-sharing on Zoom. (Have you tried the new vanishing pen?) But in all seriousness, we accomplished a lot despite another challenging year, and we couldn’t be more grateful for the incredible Dyspatchios who make it all possible.
Our highlights from 2021? Mandatory walks and everything below:
How we made Dyspatch better for our customers
Click and connect Iterable with Dyspatch
We added a direct integration with Iterable, a powerful cross-channel marketing platform. This click and connect integration allows Dyspatch users to sync their published email templates to Iterable in just a few seconds.
As a result, Dyspatch and Iterable users benefit from a truly seamless email workflow. Enjoy the ease and speed of our leading no-code email builder, paired with the power of Iterable’s world-class customer experience platform.
This integration includes support for variable fields and localizations, so you can add dynamic data to your Dyspatch templates. You can also localize your templates in Dyspatch, and automatically push them to the appropriate locale project in Iterable.
Learn more: Sync Email Templates to Iterable, Now in Dyspatch
Read the documentation: Exporting a Dyspatch Template to Iterable
Add responsive dividers, spacers, and social icons to your templates with ease
We’re always looking for ways to make email creation quicker and more efficient. To that end, we continue to add new components to our proprietary email code, the Dyspatch Markup Language (DML).
Some notable additions from the past year include a responsive divider, spacer, and 21 popular social media platform icons, from Facebook to YouTube to Spotify and more. You can now use dys-divider to save time implementing a responsive divider, dys-spacer to add a little white space between sections, or dys-social with dys-social-element tags to add standard social icons (instead of scouring the web for the right ones!).
Read the documentation: dys-divider and dys-social
Design with Canva, directly in Dyspatch
We partnered with Canva, the world’s leading visual communications platform, to create a seamless design experience in Dyspatch. With an integrated Canva button, users can access millions of professional Canva designs or create their own, right within Dyspatch.
This helps our users save time and get creative with their designs. No need to click between two separate platforms or upload assets from one platform to the other. Access and edit all your Canva designs from Dyspatch’s visual editor.
Learn more: Email Production Platform Dyspatch Partners With Canva to Make Email Design Effortless
‘Quick approve’ your templates for a faster email workflow
We know how important it is to get your emails to market quickly. That’s why we implemented ‘quick approve’, a feature that allows users to skip the approval process and publish a template with minimal clicks.
This addition is ideal for small teams where creators are also approvers, or larger teams looking to speed up production. With this feature enabled, users still go through the preview and testing screens to ensure email quality. But once testing is complete, they can approve a template themselves — instead of involving stakeholders who aren’t part of the critical path to publishing.
Learn more: Get Emails to Market Faster With Quick Approve in Dyspatch
Click and connect SendGrid with Dyspatch
We added a direct integration to SendGrid as well — one of the leading email service providers on the market. With this real-time integration, you can push your Dyspatch email templates to SendGrid in seconds.
With support for variable fields and localized content, you don’t have to worry about taking any extra steps. You can build beautiful, responsive, and dynamic email templates in Dyspatch and integrate seamlessly with SendGrid for sending. SendGrid also supports AMP for Email, so you can take advantage of Dyspatch’s library of pre-coded interactive AMP email apps to boost engagement and conversions.
Learn more: Sync Email Templates to SendGrid, Now in Dyspatch
Read the documentation: Exporting a Dyspatch Template to SendGrid
Simplify your email localizations with block level support
We made the localization process in Dyspatch even easier with block level support. Before this update, global updates to a translation had to be made on individual templates. Now, you can make a change once at the block level and share that content across all your email templates.
This saves you valuable time and resources — no more updating every template or re-translating the same content multiple times. If only one or two strings have changed in your template, you can send just the affected block for translation, instead of the whole template.
Learn more: Simplify Your Content Localization Process With Block Localization Support
Read the documentation: Localizing a Template
Send preview emails to all your stakeholders
We’re all about helping everyone achieve email excellence. And testing and previewing is an essential step to get to that goal. So to complement Dyspatch’s built-in Litmus testing, we added the ability to send a preview of your email to a stakeholder’s inbox, and select whether to send the HTML version, the AMP for Email version, or both.
Before, you could send a preview to your personal inbox. But now, you can share previews with anyone in your organization. This speeds up the approval process, while making collaboration even more seamless. And since AMP emails default to the fallback when forwarded, this guarantees granular testing for all your stakeholders.
Read the documentation: Testing a Template With Multiple Email Clients
Find your favorite emojis, right in Dyspatch 🎉 🥳 🎉
Emails are more fun with emojis. So we added the ability to easily include emojis in your email copy when using Dyspatch’s visual editor. Just look for the 🙂 icon in the rich text editor when editing copy blocks to select an emoji. You can also search for a specific emoji or use :shortcodes: to quickly add your favorite ones. Our favorite at Dyspatch? ⚡ (Can you tell we love AMP for Email?)
Leverage our no-code AMP email theme: Lightning
If you’ve been following Dyspatch this year, you know how much we love AMP for Email. One of our goals is to unlock this interactive technology and make it accessible to all marketing teams. To that end, we kicked off the year by introducing a fully coded AMP email theme: Lightning.
Lightning is an AMP-ready, mobile-responsive theme available with all Dyspatch plans. With pre-coded AMP content blocks, Dyspatch users can quickly add interactive elements to their emails to increase engagement and conversions. Lighting includes pre-coded content for all types of use cases: AMP surveys, carousels for product recommendations, and more!
Learn more: Create AMP Emails in Dyspatch With our Pre-Coded Templates
How our customers benefited from Dyspatch
Canva is a leading online design platform, used to create social media graphics, presentations, posters, documents, and more.
“Dyspatch has massively reduced the hours our team spends on creating emails, which has allowed us to really scale our content production. We’re producing over 20 emails a week, and the platform ensures every single one is on-brand, localized, and responsive, without any engineering effort. It’s also allowed us to implement interactivity with AMP comment reply emails. The Dyspatch team was so supportive and collaborative on that project, and it’s been a huge success with our users.”
— Megan Walsh, Global Head of Lifecycle Marketing at Canva
CareHive is a digital healthcare solutions provider that combines award-winning patient care with data-enabled technology.
“Our design and development teams have not had to update Dyspatch emails since the original set up. Thanks to the easy customization and markup language provided by Dyspatch, our product copywriters have been able to update campaigns without help from the design or development team.”
— Hector Oropeza, Sr. Product Designer at CareHive
Read the case study: How CareHive Reclaimed Engineering Resources Spent on Email
Grover is an innovative, subscription-based platform that allows customers to rent out the latest tech, rather than investing in it up front.
“Dyspatch is the perfect solution to manage the email building and template creation process. Combined with Braze, it creates a holistic workflow for localizations and scaling our email channel.”
— Karan Gupta, Head of Retention at Grover
Read the case study: How Grover Sped Up Email Creation by 92% With Dyspatch
What else did we get up to?
We unveiled a new website!
From refreshed branding to brand new content, the Dyspatch website got a total overhaul. Our goal with this project was to better serve our users with a simplified site experience, while better conveying our story and values. Check it out and let us know what you think!
We attended Litmus Live 2021…
Dyspatch experts participated in some amazing events, like Litmus Live 2021. At this virtual conference, our VP Product, Vero Best, shared five proven ways to build trust, improve time to market, and boost email engagement by up to 500%.
Watch the session: 5 Ways to Increase Email Engagement and Conversions
…and MarTech 2021
Dyspatch’s very own CEO and Founder, Matt Harris, delivered a dynamite session at MarTech 2021, featuring 10 innovative techniques to increase engagement. (Spoiler alert: These techniques star AMP for Email!)
Read the recap: 10 Next Level Email Techniques to Increase Engagement
…and we put on a webinar with Smartling, the leading AI-powered translations platform
Our VP Product, Vero Best, also teamed up with Smartling’s Head of Marketing, Adrian Cohn, to dig into the challenges of email localization. By the end of this webinar, you’ll understand how to scale your email localization strategy with a streamlined workflow and AI-powered translations. Stay tuned for more improvements to streamline the workflow between Smartling and Dyspatch in 2022!
Read the recap: Localizing Your Email Templates at Scale
2021 is a wrap!
Thank you for sticking with us through another challenging yet rewarding year. We hope these updates (and all the little ones we didn’t mention here) will help you get the most out of Dyspatch, or entice you to give it a try.
As amazing a year as 2021 was, we think 2022 is going to be even better. We can’t give too much away, but we have some big news to share with you in January. (Stay tuned for a press release!)
We also have a ton of exciting new improvements coming to Dyspatch, including more integrations (because Salesforce Marketing Cloud now supports AMP for Email!), more interactive AMP email apps, and more UX tweaks to help you create even better email experiences.
Have an idea for an improvement to our platform? Don’t hesitate to reach out. We’re always listening to your feedback — that’s how we prioritize what projects to work on — and our product team would love to hear from you.
From all of us here at Dyspatch, wishing you happy holidays and a joyful New Year!
