How Urbandoor moves faster when testing and iterating on email content

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Case study - Urbandoor
⏱ 4 minute read

How Urbandoor moves faster when testing and iterating on email content

Executive summary

As a global marketplace for furnished apartments built for busy professionals, communication meant everything to Urbandoor’s client base of property providers and accommodation seekers.

But finding the right email solution to make communication seamless was no simple task. In facilitating both commerce and conversation between accommodation-providers and those traveling or relocating for work, every email sent by Urbandoor was business-critical. No room for accidents, regulatory oversights, or slow send times. 

With Dyspatch’s email builder, Urbandoor was able to streamline and speed up their email production while also reducing errors and ensuring quality. By finding the right email production workflow for them, they eliminated the need for third parties, and made sure the right messages went out to the right people, every time. 

The bottom line? Urbandoor improved their transactional email performance with Dyspatch. They saved valuable resources by centralizing their email production and collaboration, allowing them to focus more on what really matters: Growing their business and their relationships with customers. 

Urbandoor’s streamlined email strategy helped set the stage for their success, and ultimately, their acquisition by Airbnb in 2019. 

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The challenge

Like many companies who recognize the incredible ROI of email, Urbandoor needed an all-in-one email template management system that would help them troubleshoot and optimize their transactional emails.

As a global business requiring GDPR compliance, they also needed a centralized space where all stakeholders could weigh in and review. Without the right conditions and guardrails in place though, non-technical team members didn’t have the ability to contribute, without risking errors.

And since every email Urbandoor sent was business-critical, mistakes were the equivalent of a service outage — an unacceptable outcome that came with huge costs.

All this to say, Urbandoor needed a solution that existed outside of the critical path of email — in order to remove the risks associated with non-technical users deploying email into production. And they needed it all to work seamlessly.

The Dyspatch solution

Dyspatch’s no-code email builder was the perfect template management solution to meet Urbandoor’s architectural needs, sitting, as it does, outside the critical path of email.

By streamlining email production and allowing multiple teams to interface seamlessly within a single, fully-integrated workspace, the platform struck that hard-to-find balance: Facilitating collaboration, while safeguarding quality.

And ensuring GDPR compliance? That becomes a breeze when you can easily lock parts of your templates, like footers and legal copy. Urbandoor also found the Dyspatch team to be very helpful, and responsive to feedback and feature requests.

“The team’s openness about where Dyspatch is at is definitely something that influenced our decision. How transparent they’ve been about the product roadmap and release dates has all been great.“

Dave Greenstein, Chief Architect & Head of Growth at Urbandoor

What’s more, Dyspatch’s underlying markup language, DML, is not only mobile responsive by nature — it’s break-proof. That means non-engineers never have to worry about breaking bits of code, or even a whole template. So Urbandoor’s business-critical emails never suffered these types of mistakes.

Plus, the platform plays oh-so-nicely with others. Urbandoor’s continuous integration process allowed them to test all emails before pushing them forward. (And that’s in addition to Dyspatch’s built-in Litmus previewing!) As long as they wrote good tests, Urbandoor could rest easy knowing that deploying an email would never break their production system.

That’s why Dave Greenstein, Chief Architect and Head of Growth at Urbandoor, described the implementation process as ‘ridiculously easy’. He knew the most time consuming — and tedious — part of the process would be importing their existing templates. But with four API points, “[Implementation] couldn’t have been easier.”

And that’s just the kind of thing we like to hear.

“[Because of its] nice API and its great template management system, we’re able to integrate Dyspatch with our continuous integration build system, so all the tests get run on approved Dyspatch templates before the emails make it into production. So as long as we write good tests, then we should never break our production emails again. Dyspatch is just a better architecture for anyone who is doing continuous integration.”

Dave Greenstein, Chief Architect & Head of Growth at Urbandoor

The results

With Dyspatch, Urbandoor moved faster and more efficiently on all things email. From creating and reviewing to testing and iterating, the platform provided the perfect architectural fit. Even non-technical users could make risk-proof content changes that came at no engineering cost to the company.

In other words, Dyspatch brought even more functionality to their existing tech stack. And this allowed them to go beyond just optimizing transactional email content: They excelled, innovated, and grew to the point of acquisition.

“The thing that’s most impressed me about Dyspatch is that the team’s been able to keep it a really simple product to use. It just fits perfectly, solving an extremely important problem that lots and lots of companies have – managing email content. Dyspatch becomes a pretty critical piece, but one that fits perfectly into a more complex email architecture.”

Dave Greenstein, Chief Architect & Head of Growth at Urbandoor

What’s next?

Taking their business to the global stage meant internationalization played an increasingly important role for Urbandoor. Luckily, Dyspatch’s localization support comes built right in, so Urbandoor was all set to reach new audiences with their email program.

To effectively target each new market, Urbandoor had the ability to create localized versions of each template that could easily be translated via Portable Object Template (POT) and Portable Object (PO) files.

At the end of the day, Dyspatch gave Urbandoor the ability to scale with built-in support for 300+ locales. And the company certainly succeeded in gaining traction — their acquisition by Airbnb proves just that!

About Urbandoor

Urbandoor is a global marketplace for furnished apartments that connects professionals with rental options. Urbandoor was acquired by AirBnB in 2019.

Industry

Accomodations

Company size

50-100

Dyspatch product

No-code email builder

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