A Year in Review: the best of 2021

The festivities are just around the corner and it’s time to take stock of the year about to end before leaving for the Christmas break.

Here is some of what happened at MailUp in 2021 and what awaits us in the coming year.

Let’s start with a few numbers, just to get into the mood of the Christmas bingo nights awaiting us.
Some facts about what we have achieved in 2021:

• over 21 billion emails sent
• over 131 million SMS messages sent
• 13,000+ support requests handled
• +98% customers satisfied with Technical Support
• an average rating of over 4 points out of 5 in the main peer reviews
• 16 new recruitments
• over 4000 participants in webinars and training courses
• 388 hours of training provided
• 224 deliverability consultancies provided

And we never stopped publishing new resources to entertain and inform you:

• 6 ebooks and guides published
• 2 statistical observers
• 23 webinars and online events
• 84 blog posts

But let’s find out more about the milestones of these 12 months, and how we managed to reach these important numbers in a year when the aftermath of the Covid-19 pandemic is far from over and, like everyone else, we had to adjust to the new post-pandemic scenario.

The newest features of the BEE editor

2021 began with the newest designs of the BEE editor  integrated into the MailUp platform, renewed with a series of features to ensure an even more optimized email and landing page design:

• new GIF and sticker sets
• new emojis for the email subject
• the introduction of letter spacing to increase the space between characters
• the possibility to automatically insert the title tags H1, H2 and H3

The new features for SMS: here come the Aliases

Important news was also announced during the first months of the year about SMS Marketing: the ability to personalize the sender name  and replace the phone number with a text-based sender, thanks to the creation and registration of Alias directly on the platform. The news certainly helped many customers improve the performance of their SMS campaigns, gaining points in terms of recognizability and sender reputation.

The case studies of Banco BPM and Xiaomi

The first months of the year gave space to the results shared by two important customers, Banco BPM and Xiaomi, the outcome of teamwork with the MailUp platform. The two case studies show how the platform can be used for completely different sectors, here Banking and E-commerce, to achieve the same goal: customize the user’s experience and customer journey.

2021 Email Statistical Observatory

The second quarter of the year began with two major studies, the result of the analysis of email campaigns of over 10,000 MailUp customers:

• a focus on the incidence of keywords tied to the pandemic (such as “Covid”, “delivery”, “emergency”, “at home”) on 2020 campaigns
• The 2021 Statistical Observatory, out traditional study on the performance and trends of Email Marketing in Italy

Both studies revealed interesting statistics on the influence of the Covid emergency on the digital marketing activities of Italian companies. The data confirmed that the email channel has proved not only important, but essential to ensure the survival of small and medium-sized Italian businesses.

Digitalization of SMEs in the post-Covid era

Also on the theme of web marketing and digital transformation in the post-Covid scenario, we have given space to further insights on the state of digitalization of Italian SMES, with particular attention to sectors such as:

• Retail, with the precious help of Gianluca Diegoli, who explored the theme digitalization of retail in the post-pandemic scenario  through the publication of 4 articles on the MailUp blog
• the digital agencies, with  Simone Tornabene’s advice on the most effective ways to face the new challenges and trends of the new digital scenario

More news on the platform on landing page, email and SMS fronts

2021 Q2 also left room for other interesting new features of the MailUp platform on the landing page front:

• the introduction of registration forms
• the ability to activate the Hide on feature and hide some elements of landing pages on mobiles, to ensure an even more responsive design
• new ready-to-use templates.

The novelties are not limited to the landing page. On the email side, the introduction of an alert system for dynamic fields and a series of changes in the BEE editor to increase text readability have made it even easier to create messages, while for the SMS function, the possibility of concatenating up to 10 SMS messages has expanded the boundaries of message customization.

And a special edition of the MailUp Statistical Observatory  was dedicated to the SMS world, to investigate the use Italian companies put to this channel. For this first edition of the SMS Observatory, the results that emerged were compared with those of 2019, to understand the evolution of a channel that, according to the data, has proved to be anything but obsolete.

A new brand identity for the group: it’s time for Growens

Q2 was also the period that saw the evolution of MailUp Group in the new brand Growens: a new identity for the group that MailUp founded and proudly started as a Business Unit. The new identity brings with it ambitious business challenges and new growth goals.

The return of in person events

Q3 opened with the planning and resumption of in person events. The ball got rolling with the 2021 Global Summit, an event dedicated to the digital marketing business community that gave us the chance to return to live moments of dialogue and organize one-to-one meetings after the long stop of the pandemic.

The in-person events continued after the summer break with a reprogramming for the autumn and, we expect, for the new year.

The release of Apple’s Mail Privacy Protection and the first monitoring of this new feature in the world of Email Marketing

In September the release of Apple’s iOS 15 was accompanied by the introduction of a Mail Privacy Policy, i.e., the adoption of new restrictions on user data and privacy processing, a shock to the world of email marketing and data driven strategies. Apple’s restrictions began to show their first effects on the performance of the email channel in the following Q4.

A new plugin to collect newsletter subscribers

September was also the month of launch of the new MailUp plugin for WordPress, designed to facilitate gathering contacts and segmentation of the database.

The new plugin, also made available to users who activate a free trial of the MailUp platform, allows you to collect new subscribers to newsletters and DEM directly from the WordPress site and automatically upload data to the lists of the MailUp platform, without any intermediate passage.

In person MailUp events continue

After the summer break, two important national and international events characterized MailUp’s Q4:

• The Richmond e-commerce forum, three days dedicated to business matching in the e-commerce sector 
• WOBI Colombia, an event that has brought together CEOs, entrepreneurs, innovators and thinkers for years to focus on the most relevant topics for those involved in business and that has allowed us to bring MailUp know-how and experience overseas

E-mail is 50 years old

2021 was also the 50th anniversary of the email channel. Born in 1971, email has gone through half a century of history, which we tried to summarize with an article entirely dedicated to this important birthday.

Growens presents “Wow”: an innovative manifesto on the future of work patterns

In the Growens Group’s first year, there was no lack of news underlining the brand’s innovative direction and its desire for growth and change:

In November, the brand announced a new Way of Working for all the Group’s Business Units, including MailUp. Innovative and flexible, the group’s future will be characterized by hybrid working formulas, which will allow each working team to choose places and work patterns.

Also in November, for the second year in a row, the Growens Group entered the ranking of Growth Leaders 2022 drafted by Il Sole 24 Ore and Statista, the list of 450 Italian companies with the highest growth in turnover from 2017 to 2020.

MailUp for WordPress: updating the plugin to make it compatible with WPML

After the launch of the MailUp for WordPress plugin we started collecting the first feedback and worked on improvements. We then implemented an initial update and made MailUp for WordPress compatible with WPML, WordPress plugin that allows you to have on a single site in different languages instance, simplifying the creation and execution of multilingual sites. Thanks to this update, the forms created with the MailUp for WordPress plugin are now translatable in all their fields with WPML and can be localized in all versions of the website: Italian, English, Spanish etc.

HTML 3.0: the latest innovation of the platform to close 2021

Lighter emails, faster to load and easier to view. These are the main advantages of HTML 3.0, the latest news from MailUp. Messages created with the BEE editor integrated into the MailUp platform have been reduced by 56%, reducing the risk of truncated display and optimizing the compatibility and delivery of campaigns on major mail clients. This feature represents an important upgrade in the field of Email D

These were, in short, the main innovations that saw the light during this long 2021.

And, without spoiling things, we hope to surprise you again with new events, resources, appointments and news for the coming 2022.