2016 in Review: A Year With MailUp
One guideline inspired all of MailUp’s work in 2016: giving more and more to our customers. More in terms of the power of the platform and the tools we offer, but above all in terms of our presence and consulting.
We could sum up all of the choices and changes made during this (long) year in three words: strategic advisory approach. Once we were able to offer the best Email & SMS Marketing tools on the market, the next step was to work side-by-side with companies to build the ideal solution for their every need from A to Z.
From developing integrations to strategic support, from creating creative concepts to optimizing results.
Support, consulting and customized solutions have been our mantra throughout 2016. Let’s take a closer look at how these came to fruition.
99% of emails delivered
Strictly speaking, the data refers to emails sent in 2015. However we disclosed it in our Observatory (in Italian only) this year, so this data is perfectly eligible for inclusion in our 2016 recap.
We are very proud of the great milestone achieved in terms of deliverability: as much as 99% of the messages sent through the MailUp platform were delivered. This excellent result reflects MailUp’s ongoing and deep commitment to improving deliverability systems and technologies, but it is also thanks to our customers’ growing attention to cleaner and safer lists. MailUp has long been actively promoting a culture of clean, consensual database building, and we are thrilled of the results achieved so far.
Empowering the SMS channel
This year, great efforts have been made to enhance the SMS channel. The integration between channels is now a must for all companies: MailUp strives to provide increasingly flexible tools with an advanced multi-channel approach. Here are the main advancements for SMS:
- Increased sending frequency
- Enhanced infrastructure
- Inbound SMS: This type of SMS calls for a reply from recipients – an exchange of text messages between brands and customers, to create engagement and an active conversation, using automated keywords.
- Ability to collect phone numbers from the Facebook App
- Coming soon: Addition of the SMS field to the Jade app and the option to create integrated email/SMS workflows.
Focus on integrations
Integration means power. This is why MailUp works day in day out to ensure the highest possible number of integrations between its platform and CRM, CMS, e-commerce platforms and external databases.
In 2016, we worked on many updates to our API library, with the aim to create a community of developers and encourage applications to be created by third parties. These are our main recent integrations:
- Integration with PrestaShop, developed by Pronesis
- Integration with MS Dynamics, developed by Reply
Soon we’ll open up a new communication channel to programmers who make integrations using MailUp’s APIs. At the same time, we’re working to make it faster and faster to develop customizations.
Read the article on the integration with PrestaShop or discover all MailUp integrations >
Introducing the Enterprise edition
In April, MailUp expanded its commercial offer: we welcomed Enterprise – the new plan that provides businesses with an advanced email and SMS marketing service, modeled on the customer’s specific needs, with dedicated consulting from our support teams.
Based on our experience with over ten years of operation, MailUp Enterprise was introduced with the goal of providing – in a single solution – all of the resources, expertise and technological tools to meet the most specific market needs, requiring a high degree of customization in terms of configuration, integration and deliverability.
Website and blog restyling
New year, new look – for both the MailUp website and blog. With this change, we meant to improve the user experience, to make way for a simpler, streamlined browsing experience and, last but not least, give our content a fancier, nicer look.
In our blog, in particular, we reviewed categories, introduced tags for easier browsing and made the whole reading experience a whole lot prettier.
Restyling and redesign do not end here: in early 2017 this will also extend to the MailUp platform. No details yet, but… brace yourself to be amazed 🙂
To learn, to improve, to master
MailUp has always been actively engaged in spreading a Digital Marketing culture able to help businesses and marketers to improve their performance in practice. This commitment is channeled two ways – in the production of in-depth content such as guides, ebooks, white papers, webinars and blog posts, and in the organization of educational events like the MailUp Academy.
With the 7 days of MailUp Academy, we have introduced a new format that combines training and networking. These one-day events are dedicated to clients and prospects and provide an exceptional framework where Email and SMS Marketing best practices, techniques and strategies are discussed, learned, seen into practice. We are very proud of the success the MailUp Academy has met, and will put more work into in during 2017.
Here is all the content we’ve produced in 2016:
- 1 observatory
- 1 white paper
- 1 ebook
- 53 blog posts
These are the resources you can (re)read:
2016 events
2016 was an eventful year:
- 15 speeches workshops: Italy, South America, USA, and more. We have been travelling to the four corners of the world to gather feedback and meet customers, partners and professionals.
- 17 trade shows: not just business contacts, but training and fresh opportunities to talk about the world of MailUp.
Overall, together with MailUp Academy, 40 events have brought us closer to the needs of our customers and companies in various sectors. Great desire to learn from the market and talk about the potential, tools and best practices of Email and SMS Marketing.
These events are just the start of a long journey of business consulting, to offer not only a technological solution, but also integration techniques and strategic solutions for effective and high-performing campaigns.
10,000 customers reached
A major milestone was reached toward the end of the year: we hit 10,000 customers! This record reinforces MailUp’s leadership on the domestic and international market – reminding us of of the long road we’ve covered since back in 2003 when the company was founded in the small Italian town of Cremona.
User-centred – truly so
This past year has seen a great commitment to improving and optimizing customer support services. The Customer Care and Support teams have gone out of their way to reduce their response times when answering questions and queries, bringing in new flows and ways of working.
Here are a few figures that sum up the results for 2016:
- 1,255 requests for help to Customer Care
- 18,700 requests for help to Support
- On average, just 2.7 hours to provide ‘lifesaver’ assistance
- 97.5% satisfied customers 🙂
New BEE features
For MailUp, the BEE drag&drop editor is a place for constant experimentation. Since its first launch in 2014, it has undergone a huge number of improvements with the addition of new developments and features. These are the main changes introduced in 2016:
- Release of the first version of BEE Pro
- New block of HTML content, allowing you to add a customized code (such as countdown timers or other interactive elements) in messages created with the editor
- Direct image search in royalty-free photo databases
- Support for customized fonts
- Ability to insert background images
- 16 languages now supported (more coming)
Empowering automation with new workflows
Having the best tools available to fully unlock the potential of email automation is not just a recommended best practice, but a distinct strategy that will increasingly determine the success of marketing operations.
In the latest version of the platform, MailUp has made email automation easier, more effective and more intuitive. The platform has been enhanced by new workflows that allow you to create profiled automatic campaigns based on the recipients’ interests, personal data and activities in a matter of minutes. This allows a quick, smart integration of all steps of automated communication with users, enabling you to set up trigger events, response times and next actions. All thanks to an easy-to-use drag&drop interface.
New mailing engine
We have rebuilt the email sending system from scratch, and now it is much more robust and scalable. This was proven during Black Friday: 75 million emails sent with the new engine, and not a hitch!
Updated MailUp Facebook App
Launched in beta in March 2015, the MailUp Facebook App is a simple and effective tool that allows you to create a newsletter subscription form to include in your Facebook page with just a few drag & drop operations.
In November 2016 , the Facebook App came out of the beta phase thanks to the feedbacks from over one thousand users gained during its first year of life. The new release puts SMS and email side by side with a multi-channel approach that enables brands to integrate and deploy their own email and SMS marketing strategies. It also gives users the option to select the correct country code from a drop-down menu, minimizing the chance of error when importing incorrectly written prefixes.
This creates a direct bridge between the Facebook page and the SMS channel of the MailUp platform – ideal for cross-channel database building. More news will follow in the coming months: stay tuned!
Drag&drop editor for landing pages
Back in summer 2015 , we launched the drag&drop editor to create landing pages to include in your SMS campaigns. In 2016, we have extended the feature also to the email channel!
The editor allows you to choose from a wide range of templates which you can customize with the assurance that the final product will already be optimized for mobile devices, as well as editable, traceable and easy to connect to your emails and SMS. That extra something that makes a difference.
2017: Coming soon
We have come a long way, but we certainly won’t stop here. We have so many plans for 2017, and most of them are already in progress. We will start the new year with a key new feature: the new version of the MailUp platform!
With MailUp 9, we go back to the user experience by listening to the feedback of those who had long been coming up against a hurdle when using the MailUp platform with a rather unintuitive UX/UI. What’s more, we’ll add many new features designed to meet the increasingly wide range of needs of those who deal with Email and SMS Marketing.
Here’s a teaser of the main new features:
- Completely redesigned UX/UI
- New home dashboard
- New Collaboration tool to share projects with the rest of the team and allow others to comment, suggest changes and respond to comments
- Creation of integrated email/SMS workflows
- New contact pages with individual statistics
Of course, the new features don’t stop there. Stay tuned and… Happy New Year 🙂
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