Community Engagement services review: SendGrid, GetSatisfaction

A Review of Services I’ve used in GameGround – Part II – Marketing tools  

This is the 2^nd part in a series of blog posts reviewing several 3^rd pty products and services I’ve used in GameGround and my take on them. The basic approach I’m taking here is the applicability of the product for a lean-startup that wants to move fast. In the last post I wrote about A/B/Split testing tools for the marketing team. This post is about Community Mgmt. Next up – Web analytics and BI reporting, OPS tools and of course, development infrastructure.

SendGrid

One of the first features every service has is sending email to customers. There are 2 basic types of emails to send: transactional and mass-mailing. Transactional emails are those produced as a result of a user action, like registration, friend invites etc. Mass-mailing are those when you invite your registered users to an event, a sale etc. So why not use your own corporate SMTP server for those emails? Because you are likely to find yourself in one of the many black lists of spam servers at some point. If spam filters on several servers worldwide find your emails to be spam or If 2-3% of your users mark your email as spam you’ll be black listed and will not be able to send emails from your company at all… bad idea. Other issues you’ll have to manage yourself if you don’t use a SAAS for this is managing unsubscribe lists (<1% of users on social networks unsubscribe in average) and email bounce list (~12% of email address users give on social networks are miss-typed or bogus). Managing those lists is mandatory if you don’t want to get black-listed.

We started with using MailChimp, probably the largest of several competing services, but quickly found that they will not send our mass-mails as they are afraid their servers would get black-listed. We then had the same issue with Constant Contact and CampaginMonitor. It seems that most EMS vendors send all email from a set of about a dozen shared IP addresses. Thus, they have to minimize complaints across their entire portfolio. Most EMS vendors require that you give your users either opt-in (“I’m willing to get marketing materials” checkbox on registration) or double opt-in (+email verification). And if the complaints rate resulting from your service is above a very low rate they kick you out. On our first campaign to just 1200 registered users we had a complaint rate of 1.1% and their acceptable limit was 0.2%… For a young company with little history records that is running its first campaigns the demanded ratios we not acceptable. And- we wanted to have an opt-out on sign up, not an opt-in. We got stuck for a few days till we managed to resolve the mess.

Then entered SendGrid! SendGrid is a cloud-based SAAS with a technology that seems to be far more resilient to black-listing. Their white-label feature allows you to bind your domain MX records to one of their servers with an IP address in cloud. This means you do not share IPs with others and do not need to comply with such low complaints rates. If you get black listed you can change IP address and/or domain name and get back on business in a matter of minutes. So we set up 2 accounts – one for transactional emails, that are less likely to cause blacklisting, and bound it the company’s domain name. Then we bought another domain ‘mailer1 –mycompany.com’ and bound it to the second account. SendGrid system appends an ‘unsubscribe’ link to your emails if you don’t do it yourself and they manage the lists for you – they won’t send an email to someone who unsubscribed, even your service did send them. You get a dashboard where you can see stats of your sent mails, bounces, spam reports etc. and fix your email templates as needed.

The integration with SendGrid’s basic SMTP service took us 15 minutes. They also give you APIs to sync user lists, send using predefined templates etc. but we haven’t got to use those. Pricing is low for what you get. It’s highly recommended to work with them and utilize their APIs to save you the need to write email templates and change them every other days according with the product needs. Let the product guys edit the email templates on SendGrid control panel. No code changes involved unless a radical change is made and different parameters are needed to fill-in the template. So much simpler to operate this feature too. Our email system is working fine with a delivery rate of ~95% on the transactional emails, which is excellent.

Now, how about some tips on how to avoid getting your emails marked as spam? This is a bit out of scope here – maybe I’ll do another post on the quests I’ve had to work-around the spam filters mine-fields. Meanwhile, you may want to read here.

GetSatisfaction

This very successful SAAS product allows you to add a popup widget to your website where your customers can write their feedback, good or bad, and suggest you things. It allows your support and product ppl to engage in a conversation with your customers in a productive way. The Javascript integration is simple and with a bit of extra integration you can also OAuth your logged-in users, so that you can work on a common user-base and get back to the users who wrote a feedback. The control panel allows you to define your products, settings, admin the feedback etc. To have the OAuth feature (a must in my opinion) you need to buy [expensive!] the $99/mo plan. The integration went easy and all was working in a matter of hours. BUT!!! I don’t think this product is so great:

1. The product is a hybrid between an online feedback survey and a forums product. It has the disadvantages of both: you mostly get to hear only the ppl complaining about your product; irrelevant questions and remarks bloat the service with historical and irrelevant data.
2. The loading of their widget is slow and cause long delays in the page loading -time. On some pages the feedback widget was the first thing to show up on the page (WTF???). We ended up writing a script that delay-load their script to bypass their mentality of “We’re THE product and our users are the websites using it”…
3. The suggestion engine meant to prevent users from entering the same feedback over and over again is weak.
4. You already have a Facebook page, a blog and the product pages with comments. Why do you need another place where ppl would talk about your product?! I would give this service a pass next time I’m around. Instead just open a feedback page, place a Facebook comments widgets in it and you’re done.

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