 Good afternoon. I'm here to talk to you today about how you can drive growth in your startup through email. Maybe not considered the most sexy technology, but actually one of the most effective tools in your arsenal for driving growth. As stated earlier, I'm the CMO at Sengrid, and I'm really excited to be here today. A few thoughts about Sengrid. We are one of the largest email solution providers in the world today. We provide an email API solution that allows you to send email from your application in a very easy and effective way, as well as an email marketing tool that allows your marketing team to drive growth in your business. And like many of you out there, we were a startup nine years ago, and we've scaled today to a company that's going to drive over $100 million in revenue and grow 45% and be profitable this year. And it all started with three of our founders who came up with this great idea of sending email via an API. And suddenly, we find ourselves today sending almost 1.5 billion emails every single day, close to 40 billion emails a month. We have over 120,000 customers. And we're really excited to be here today. So who out there is using email to communicate with your customers? Can I see a raise of hands? Yep. Most of you, it's a very effective tool. It started in 1971 when the first email was sent and followed just six years later when the first piece of spam was sent by a guy named Gary Tork, who was trying to sell mainframe computers to the early people that were using the email system. Today, there are 205 billion emails sent every single day. Almost half of them are spam. And 2.6 billion email users. SendGrid actually sends to 1.7 billion of those users almost every single month. So it's just a summary of our scale. 4 billion accounts worldwide. 25% of those are business work accounts. And interestingly, about 20% to 25% open rate for most marketing emails. So a large number of emails being sent are not being opened. And the average person receives 500 marketing emails every single month. There's a tremendous amount of clutter and challenge that you have to work through to be effective in your email marketing campaign. But it's true that email is the leading return on investment marketing channel. For every dollar spent on email, typically $38 in return in terms of value, it's a very, very effective channel in the market today. So I'm going to share with you five key takeaways for driving an effective email marketing campaign. And it's going to start with design and how you think about design in terms of your email strategy, followed by content, the types of elements that you use inside of your program. Contextualization or personalization, which is one of the most important elements of driving effective email today. Globalization, which is increasingly important as the world becomes smaller. And then lastly, deliverability, which is probably the single most important element of being a truly effective email marketer. You can create great designs, have awesome content, but if you don't get the email in the inbox that you're sending to, all that effort has been wasted. So let me start with design. Three keys. First, every one of your emails should have a really clear call to action. Here's a couple of our customers, Uber. Every Uber receipt that you receive comes through SendGrid, the skim. They are very, very effective at delivering a simple call to action at the end of their emails. In this case, Uber uses a social engagement strategy that's very effective for them. Every one of your emails has to have a clear call to action. You also need to use clear typography images and icons that align with your brand and reinforce it and ensure that it's not disruptive in terms of the recipient's understanding of your message. And then lastly, it's very important that you use A.B. testing to validate and optimize your email program. You should test your call to action, your color, your design, your typeface and font, and most importantly, the placement of your messages inside of your email itself. Here's a customer of ours, a retailer in the US called CB2. They tested two different emails. One with a rug call to action on the left and the second where the carpet call to action was really clear, drapes on the top and rugs on the bottom. They ended up testing this and finding that it was too confusing for their recipients and their rug test went out significantly. Second, content. Three keys here. We've done a lot of research on optimal typefaces and call to actions and the number of words that work inside of emails. But really, your subject line is one of your most important real estate elements. And we've found over and over that three words in your subject line went out in terms of engagement and open rate dramatically, driving an almost 22% increase. Also, you need to be very careful about choosing buzzwords. You should avoid words like free, ironically. You should leverage words like yesterday and tomorrow. And then avoid hashtags and especially emoticons in your content. And we have a really strong posting on our blog around the research that we did here. I encourage you to go check it out. Also, make use of your pre-header. It's often what stands between you and the open rate. A lot of people ignore this very valuable marketing real estate. You should use it to call attention to your CTA. And avoid the temptation to give your users too many calls to action. You should be very simple and clear. Make sure you use one at the end and make it very purposeful. All right, let's move on to contextualization or personalization. Today, hyper-personalization is really top of mind for so many email marketers. Personalizing the subject lines for B2C email has proven to increase open rates by more than 40%. On B2B emails, it can be closer to 20% increase. You need to move to the point where you are using past behaviors, intent, data-driven attributes to drive high levels of personalization in your email strategy. Moving away from broad segmentation to micro-segmentation and getting to the point where you're having a one-to-one conversation with your user based on past data and history. Here's an example of one of our clients, bands in town, which it's very timely. It's about an event that's taking place very soon. It's highly relevant to the user. It's based on a band that matches a profile on a selection of other bands that this particular recipient values, highly personalized, and it's regional based in where he lives in Denver. Also, set up triggered emails based on actions taken by your recipient. Here's one of our big clients, eBay, and after an auction was completed, they're able to immediately send an email to a recipient hand-picked for you, things that we thought you'd like to know about. They've also taken it to the step of actually creating a system where if the user receives an email about an auction and then three days later chooses to open it and the auction happens to be completed, they're able to publish new content dynamically into that email that's relevant to the user and it enables them to send actually less email, which is very important for their reputation with the ISPs and enables them to drive higher levels of conversion, very effective way of high levels of personalization. Also, email is becoming much more interactive. Here's one of our client, Jack Threads, who actually uses CSS3 and HTML5 to publish interactive checkout experiences into their email itself. This allows you to send an email to a user, have it be highly personalized based on their past, purchasing history, and enable them to buy directly inside the email itself without having to go directly to the website. Very, very effective tool for contextually driving behavior and results inside your email program. Okay, let's move on to globalization, which many of you I'm sure are sending email outside of Japan and to other areas of the world. It's a key way for driving acquisition and engagement inside your customer base. Your global strategy needs to be localized to the country that you send to, whether it's language, content, or offers. And if you're driving an e-commerce strategy, it really needs to be aligned with the local currency that you're sending to and the local payment types, like the Konbini in Japan, for example. You also need to ensure that you're adhering to the compliance standards of each country that you're operating in. They're very different. Finland, for example, requires you to publish the IP address that you acquired the individual customer from in the footer of the email. The recipient can't see it, but the ISP can. Russia has tremendous requirements around privacy. The European Union has a variety of different ones. It's very important that you understand the different compliance elements of the various parts of the world if you're gonna be sending into those countries. Canada, for example, has a very aggressive privacy opt-in policy called CASL. Also, users engage differently where they are in the world based on different devices. So here's an example of our customer base where India tends to open much more of their email on a website or a desktop computer versus a mobile device. In the United Kingdom, it's close to 65% mobile. Here in Japan, based on our data, it's about 60%. And ironically, most of those are on iPhones or iPads. Almost 96% of those opens. And 60% of those recipients are opening their email and Gmail. So you have to be highly focused on the different types of devices as well as the global ISPs. They operate quite frankly very differently in different parts of the world. The Big Four, Gmail, AOL, Microsoft, and Yahoo, they're receiving the vast majority of email in the world today. But Orange, for example, in the EU, little less sophisticated technically, they're using complaint rates from email to make big decisions about reputation management. And if you're gonna be sending into Europe, you need to understand that unique variance around Orange to be successful. Lastly, I wanna talk about deliverability, which is the industry term for getting that email inside the inbox itself. 21% of legitimate email never reaches the inbox because of challenges around deliverability, frankly not knowing the unique requirements that each ISP have to manage reputation of the sender. Deliverability is very complex. There's both a technical and a human aspect. On the technical side, you need to understand your IP architecture and reputation of your IP addresses that you're sending from. You need to understand email authentication processes, which I'll talk about in a minute. Complex things like transport layers, security, automated bounce processing, automated compliance processing. On the human side, you need to understand the vagaries of whitelisting to enable brand reputation and management. You need to understand the realities of blacklisting and how you remediate if you become blacklisted by a company like Spamhouse, for example. Also, all the compliance elements around the world and various elements of the ISP relationship and particularly the reputation management of your ISPs. So let's talk a little bit deeper about deliverability, which has impacts around reach, conversion, touch, engagement, really, really important. First up, learn the rules of the email road. Know your can spam requirements, your castle elements, your German opt-in requirements, your Russian federalization law. It's very complex. We're gonna be sending in different parts of the world. You need to understand this or you will be blacklisted by your ISPs. Consider leveraging a service provider who understands the unique elements of email authentication, such as SPF, de-chem signatures, the DNS and MX record elements, and then, of course, increasingly demark policies and analytics have become a more important element of email sending than ever before as more ISPs move toward domain management for reputation. Okay, you go out and you create your smart email campaigns and you're super confident in your headers and your subject line and your email message content and your design, all the things that I talked about earlier. Make sure that you're managing, however, your lists in a smart way. Don't assume that everybody wants more than three emails a day. It's often not the case. Make sure you AB test all of your messaging and are optimizing, particularly for placement, and send less emails to those who don't open or click on a regular basis. In fact, if somebody doesn't open an email after six to nine months, you should drop them from your list and you should be continually pruning the bottom one to 5% of your list and not sending them to the old list to maintain your reputation and your engagement rate with the ISPs. And whatever you do, do not buy public email lists. They're filled with spam traps and they will almost guarantee that you will be blacklisted at some point in time by one of the services. Make sure you avoid detours to the inbox. Confirm if you need to warm up your IPs. It's a standard process of managing reputation with your ISP. If you start sending off of a new IP address, you want to start sending slowly. 10 emails the first day, 25 or 30 the next day, moving up to the hundreds and thousands and eventually millions. Because once they see a new IP address come out into their analytics and it's suddenly sending hundreds of thousands or millions of emails, they'll think you're a spammer and they'll shut you down. Know your target metrics and make sure you're able to pivot very quickly when you start to see problems. This requires an active daily management of email inside of a large sending program. Once you click send and your service provider delivers, you then have to think about how you did. Make sure you're managing this very clearly, looking at delivery rates, looking at opens and bounces and clicks, making sure that you're tracking your spam reports and managing your unsubscribe requests. Reputation is the key here. You need to manage your reputation with your ISPs that you send to. And the basics of this are to ask permission when you want to send email to a person, make sure they're opting in and respect it. Create an email preference center on your site or your app so that people can opt in and manage the different types of email that you're sending them. Make sure you send a welcome message the first time so that they're aware of what is gonna be going forth. And remove any unengaged email recipients. You have to continually prune your list and take out those people that are not opening or clicking on your emails in order to maintain your reputation and make it super easy to unsubscribe. On the infrastructure and authentication side, consider using dedicated IP addresses so that you can manage both your brand if they're a white listing element and understand if you need to warm them up over time. Make sure you're segmenting your email streams across different IP addresses, not just sending everything off of one. Make sure your sending domain has an SPF record. Make sure you're signing your emails with a decim signature and publishing a DMARC record. And if you don't understand what those three things are, make sure you think about using a service provider so that you can help you optimize that. So the takeaways here, design emails with a clear call to action and with branding and A.B. test everything to optimize. Create compelling content that users are gonna value and understand. Contextualize for both timeliness and relevancy and optimize for global sending. And in all of that, make sure your deliverability is world-class so that you can successfully drive growth in your business. Thank you very much. Have a good rest of the day.