An introduction to analyzing your email data using SQL and a Redshift datastore. Using data sent to a Redshift database from Vero, we’ll put together a chart that will help you start to conceptualize how you could build out a detailed and accurate Email Dashboard for your organization. This will also further the skills you […]

If you’re a Mandrill customer, last week you will have read that Mailchimp is unifying Mandrill with its Mailchimp product suite. We have immense respect for the Mandrill platform, particularly as it is used by many of Vero’s customers. With the upcoming changes, we understand that some of Mandrill’s transactional customers will have questions around […]

In 2015 two important trends emerged that everyone working to create great products and customer experiences will be interested in: It is easier than ever before to synchronise data from your SaaS tools into a data warehouse (often Amazon’s Redshift). There are more and more great tools (Periscope, RJ Metrics, Looker) that allow you to […]

2015 was the year of the newsletter. Tools like Curated, Goodbits and TinyLetter made it easier than ever to start a newsletter. Many people took advantage of these great tools and began building lists and curating content. The problem? These tools don’t suddenly make people care about what you have to say. Marketers, the chief […]

Most email marketing happens before the sale, but that’s just the beginning of the customer lifecycle. The most successful businesses send their best emails after the signup, purchase or conversion. Creating lifecycle emails require that marketers look at the whole customer, not just the sale. I was reminded of this after making a recent purchase […]

One of the many updates to our email marketing best practices guide is tip #30: Segment on Signup. We used Strava as an example. The fitness-tracking tool asks new users if they are runners or cyclists, then tailors onboarding emails to their sport of choice. It’s a simple question with a significant impact on the […]

Automation is changing the way marketers do business. Sadly, it’s also affecting customer experiences for the worse. Autoresponders – email campaigns that are triggered by a customer event – are a perfect example. Marketers use them to automate what used to be a manual process. The problem with most autoresponders, however, is that they’re sent […]

Data-driven marketing can be sophisticated, but that doesn’t mean it has to be complex. Email is a medium that tends to get overcomplicated. It’s understandable – most marketers are managing more than one email tool, dozens of lists of thousands of users. But there is some good news about email personalization – it’s more straightforward […]

Don’t make the mistake of prioritizing one time zone over another. Most marketers approach email timing this way and it’s far less than ideal. They test send times, then choose the single time that delivers the most opens and clicks. That only works if you customers are all in the same time zone. Otherwise, there’s […]

A customer-centric approach to product, marketing and support is the key to building a great company. As anyone who’s ever built a SaaS business can attest, it’s easier said than done. We always aim to help customers find their way and this, ultimately, served as the foundation for our decision to build our own help […]

Your customers are inundated with hundreds of messages every day. The signal to noise ratio is lower than ever. But somehow, a handful of businesses manage to stand out in the inbox. Some rely on data to monitor behavior and trigger messages. Others invest in good, old-fashioned branding. Still others make their mark with great […]

The Zeigarnik Effect is the uncomfortable feeling we get when things are left unfinished. That could be the cliffhanger in a season finale of your favorite TV show or the half-written proposal that’s been sitting on your desk for a week. “It seems to be human nature to finish what we start,” according to Psychwiki.com. […]

When the average person opens their inbox in the morning, most of the emails they receive don’t engage. The question we have to ask is what distinguishes those emails that do engage? The answer is that we pay attention to emails that have context (one of our favourite words here at Vero). Good emails are […]

We’ve recently been playing with a few new ideas to offer our customers better support. At Vero, we use Help Scout to manage our support inbox primarily because we love the look-and-feel of the email responses they send out. We’ve used it for nearly three years now and still find it to be well suited […]

Creating great customer experiences is about delivering something useful to each individual customer, when it is actually useful. This is all building a great company is really about: offering something useful to customers, to solve a problem when they need it. For companies serious about creating this sort of experience – email is an integral […]

Users gravitate towards utility wherever it exists. Email can deliver functionality and earn habitual engagement. It’s as important to product development as web, desktop, and mobile. Grammarly, today’s case study subject, understands exactly how to execute on this. Their emails check all the boxes of a great product: useful, accessible, interesting and personalized. The inbox […]

Transparency is hot right now, but not in email marketing. You can see how many Twitter followers a brand has. Lots of businesses blog about their audience growth. And some newsletters share their subscriber count as social proof. But no one talks about open and click rates, ROI or impact on the bottom line. It’s […]

"Billions and billions served." It may be the canonical example of social proof. We’ve all seen it and most of us are among the billions served. McDonald’s simple slogan connotes ubiquity and community. Some version of that line reaches 69 million customers each day. It’s wise to borrow strategies from companies like McDonald’s. After all, […]

An email service provider is one of many tools you need to run an email marketing campaign. As the old adage goes, it takes a village. Examining our own workflow, we realized that we use at least 10 tools in addition to Vero. We decided it would be fun to share the tools we use […]