When I talk to people about the emails they’re sending, I like to ask about what they consider to be their most important or valuable email. When I posed this question to Anthony, the CEO over at Sticker Mule, his response was really telling: he talked a bit about proof and shipping notifications, but then said “You know, a year ago, I wouldn’t have been able to answer that question.”
In the Long Long Ago
Like many companies that consist primarily of developers, email at Sticker Mule had always lived in the codebase alongside the rest of the guts of their app. But alas, even with a highly technical team, making changes to emails was a hefty process: coding and testing from a local environment and merging into production. There were a couple of obvious issues with this system:
- Insight from analytics was limited to what they could pull from their on-site setup.
- Any content person would have to be able to work within the engineering workflow (i.e. they couldn’t hire a content person)
This meant that there were huge disincentives to improving their emails – not only was the process itself painful, but there was no feedback loop to reward successes or correct failures.
Enter Sendwithus
So clearly something needed to be done. This is where Sendwithus comes in. In about a week of one developer’s time, they transitioned their entire collection of over 30 transactional emails into our system. They originally did this so that they could hire a content person, someone to manage and improve the quality of their emails, but something interesting happened along the way. Once there was a system in place to manage this content simply and with straight-forward feedback, they found they didn’t need to hire anyone.
All this isn’t to say that Sendwithus exists to replace your dedicated email team but rather that it enables everyone to contribute to the success of your communications. As it turns out, Sendwithus helped Sticker Mule make both their customers and their company happier.
Something that came up repeatedly while talking to Anthony was that he noticed any improvement that helps the team move faster tends to make everyone happier. By allowing anyone in the organization to update emails and monitor results without bothering engineering, Sendwithus made the entire Sticker Mule team more efficient and, in doing so, boosted morale.
Agile: Not Just for Development
In a fast-paced development environment where you’re testing and validating everything as you go, it’s surprising how much of a drag it can be on your team’s momentum to have a piece that doesn’t fit into that methodology. Sendwithus allowed Sticker Mule to overcome this by giving them the tools to isolate bugs, breaks, and generally under-performing email flows and fix them without derailing other projects.
Check out Sticker Mule for yourself at stickermule.com and see all their emails in real life.
