To hell with web development or "How I went headfirst into emails"

My name is Arthur Koch, and I do not see my life without Internet mailings. Many readers of Habr know me from a long series of publications on the subject of HTML-writing, but this is not all that I do. I have been working with great interest in the field of email marketing for more than a year now, and during this time a lot of interesting observations have been accumulated both in the Russian market and abroad, which I would like to talk about. It would be great if everything described below doesn’t cause the typical holivar for this topic on the topic “email notifications are not needed, burn in hell”. Places will be messy, subjective, but most likely interesting.

Start

At the beginning of the two thousandth (and maybe a little later), I, like many computer owners, became interested in web development. This was a typical mixture of the pop-at-the-moment technology stack: html, js, php. It was a long years of low-useful self-education with periodic shabashki in various forums and, of course, there was no talk about normal earnings. One day I got sick of it and I moved from the province to beautiful St. Petersburg, where, thanks to my basic skills, I got a job as a trainee in a typical webconverter. For several years, I have perfectly mastered the skill of the layout, I realized that server and client programming is not for me and the question arose of a more promising place of work. By luck, I was brought to the company Veeam Software, where I opened this side of the Internet, namely mailing.

It was something new and unknown to me. I was given a checklist layout, which should correspond to the letter and introduced to very good people who were currently in this direction. I quickly tasted all the joy of this work, because it does not compare with the classic layout for sites. Still would! We have such a small number of browsers that the layout for them does not seem so difficult. And the developers were able to more or less agree among themselves, having come to certain standards. In the case of mail clients, things are still much more interesting to this day. This is a whole zoo of randomly working parsers and interfaces.
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As time went on, the layouts gave up one after another, new interesting bugs opened up, new interesting solutions were found for them. It is damn interesting and fascinating if only because you just can’t go to the forum and ask how it is imposing, because in runet at the time of 2010, you didn’t really know how to impose letters. And if they could, they were not in a hurry to share this knowledge in public. Although I’m not going to be cunning by this point, there were already a couple of topics on the topic in Habré, but mostly they covered gradually outdated problems of webmail mail. It so happened that I left the company in a few months.

Habr

I had some good connections and I started to rivet sites again, reading Habrom along the way. And then I thought: why not write your first topic? And I tried. Over the evening sketched an article. Then he rewrote and threw in the sandbox. A week later - silence. Sat down and rewrote again, sent. The day passed, and the coveted invite was waiting for me in the inbox of my mailbox. Indescribably pleasant feeling. Like any newbie, I thought that there was an “elite” sitting on a habr. Despite numerous stinging discussions on this subject, I still think that there are a lot of talented and interesting people here. My first topic (link) was warmly received. Lively conversation in the comments, a lot of personal messages. Someone thanked, someone clarified the nuances of the layout. And, of course, not without orders. Ever since I have been making up letters, to this day discovering new bugs and their solutions. Many complain about the “hellishness” of the layout of letters, but in my case it only stirs sports interest. The following years I worked with various domestic and foreign services of a completely different profile at an outsource. This is where the fun begins.

About types of letters

For people who are not very far from the topic, this paragraph will not be very interesting. Previously, the idea of ​​mailing was simple: well, letters and letters, what is so tricky about it? But collaboration with various projects has drawn the following breakdown of letters by category

Transactional (they are official) letters:

It's simple. Confirmations of registrations on the site, placing orders, all kinds of notifications that facilitate your work with the site / service or simply force you to go there.

Trigger mailings:

These are letters, the receipt of which you as a user, provoke yourself. Registered on the site? Receive a welcome letter from a “caring” robot manager. Bought something in the online store? Get a set of recommendations for re-purchase, and stuff like that.

Regular marketing newsletters:

The purpose of such letters is to make you buy / use the author's product. Sometimes they do it silly, sometimes annoyingly, and sometimes, masterly. It is these letters that look more like an online store window than the rest.

Image letters:

My favorite type of newsletters. The task of such letters is to make you feel good about the service / brand / product without any extra marketing pieces. They give you interesting content, which at least indirectly concerns the author of the newsletter, in return for receiving your location. This is very similar to the author's mailing of the “old” Runet, which died with the advent of the blogosphere. But this is my verdict. In fact - they still exist, of course. Like services like subscribe.ru.

Spam:

I think there are no questions. You send shit to you without asking you to buy it.

Lead generation:

Not the “cleanest” way to expand the customer base, however, it works. The bottom line is that they will send you anything, just get your data: name, city, age, phone, occupation, and most importantly - email. The goal is simple: in the future you can be spammed. The most sophisticated leader-generators even offer you money for leaving your data. If you are faced with this, then it is worth understanding that you (as a lead) are worth much more. Large companies are willing to pay big money for quality leads.

About those who send

In the west, mailings have been working for a long time and only the hunchback is not dealing with them. The answer to the question “why?” Is eerily simple. It brings great money, primarily increasing sales. For the same Americans, it is put on such a high level that when they have to work with them, they don’t need advice. But the resources of maker-ups are needed by everyone. The main requirement of Western customers is adequate graceful degradation and support for mobile platforms.

And now about the Russian companies, which mostly have to work. I divide them into several types, which I will discuss in more detail below.

The first type. “And so it will come down”

Companies in this category have heard something about mailings, but they don’t care about them at all. Yes, they send confirmation of registration and checkout, but no more. Do not even keep statistics reading these letters.

Second type “Let's give it to outsource”.

These are, as a rule, large online stores, which shift all the work regarding letters to a separate artist company. The range of services of such performers is often not limited to email marketing, so the quality of their final work can be assessed as average. No matter how everyone shouted about an individual approach, in such offices everything is stamped out quite standardly. But all is not so bad. There are some great studios in Russia that work only with letters and do their work just fine. Of the coolest, I will bring, perhaps Outofcloud.

From mailers of this category, I would mention marketers from Euroset. Working with these guys is a pleasure. They constitute interesting offers, on the basis of which we jointly prepared cool templates of adaptive letters. Also had great pleasure from working with the online store Allo.

Third type Small / medium companies and startups.

My favorite category. As a rule, young and ambitious perfectionists work in such projects, who seriously approach even the least important details. Most often, they already have a cool designer who will lay out the layouts from and to, draw both desktop and mobile versions, try the craziest hipster ideas. Their marketers masturbate on A / B mailing tests and techies make perfect adaptive layouts. But in the case when own resources do not allow achieving such results, they smoothly flow into the previous type of letter senders.

The fourth type. Big companies.

If a large company did not give up work with mailings to outsourcing, then I often see the following picture: the manager tries to work out his plan according to his own scenario, without particularly bothering about the result. Mobile support? What for? In the outlook of the letter looks like a letter? Okay, so come down. Designers - like one - fossils. No, they heard about the modular grid, but to prepare graphics for retina displays and remove jpeg artifacts from the layout - for wimps. We follow the brand book, the rest is not important. An idea of ​​the features of mail clients and mobile screens is also often absent. Layout is almost always an outsource.

Also, a distinctive feature of such companies is aggressive marketing in the form of “buy and buy!”. Image mailings are carried out, but in most cases it comes down to “Look, we are engaged in charity”.

Of all the rules, there are always exceptions. Take the well-known in the Habré Mosigra. Mailings, as far as I know, are handled by Milfgard personally. And makes it very cool. We tried to jointly make a “marketing letter” for Mosigra, but it lost the “bare text” in all respects.

Avito is an interesting specimen. Nowhere else have I seen such interest of managers in the quality of their work. These are endless joint tests, close communication with designers, and just an incredibly pleasant collaboration. Nice to know that the company has such people.

A separate topic is Badoo. He did not personally cooperate with them, but this is not required to assess the quality of their work. They periodically publish the most interesting materials here at Habré, make presentations at conferences and just do their job very well ...

About those who help send

Undoubtedly it is worth telling about the services of the organization of mailings and their variants. Further, all the same in groups.

1. Western mailing services

Cool interfaces, smart support, in places - biting prices. The main plus is the ability to use the server API for sending out from your service. Cool letters ready templates. Places funded. Huge competition, companies are shaking to win a customer. As they say - the taste and color, but my choice (in the order of coolness): sendgrid, mailchimp, campaignmonitor.

Campaignmonitor is a separate plus for maintaining a cool blog and user support in the form of a high-quality forum.

2. Domestic services

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Interfaces from terrible to mediocre. Support from no to average. The price range is huge. Very strange pricing policy. The API for your own mailing lists may already have appeared, but I am not in the know. The most worthy in my opinion: Unisender, Pechkin.

About layout

To impose a letter in Russia can a very small number of people. It costs 90% of inbox to drive through the tests - a lot of bugs on the face. There are practically no adaptive letters in runet.

What I can recommend to those who impose letters:
- Read my topics on Habré.
- Read the Badoo corporate blog.
- To coat the campaignmonitor forums .
- Visit the site http://htmlemailboilerplate.com/ .
- Finally, purchase a tool for testing letters.

About Testing

Some mailing services provide tools for testing layout in various email clients, but I prefer litmus.com. Monthly license - $ 79. Within a couple of minutes after the launch of the test, you get screenshots of almost all email clients and webmord. Russian postal service absent. We test them with “pens”.

What is now and future plans

I know about the nuances of the layout of letters, if not all, then more than any other person I know personally. Today, I'm not just a freelancer. We have a small team of people in love with their business from different parts of the world. We invent scenarios, draw, typeset, discover for ourselves more and more new nuances and techniques, write texts, test and analyze. And we like to do it.

Plans to finally launch your own website and start working not only with regular customers and occasional customers, but to put this business to a higher level. And maybe in the mailboxes will be a little less than the guan.

Any questions? Let's talk in the comments.