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Articles by Kelsey Bernius
A complete guide to getting started with agentic content operations
AI projects often start off full of ambition, alignment, and positive energy. But when teams are debating models, workflows, and processes, the foundational content that feeds the agents is often overlooked. And agents can spit out some wily outputs as a result. The city of New York City learned this lesson all too well when they rolled out an AI-chatbot in 2023 that was supposed to provide new and existing business owners with reliable information and answers about running a business in the city.
GitHub Team or Free? How to choose the right plan
Choosing the right tier on your software plan can be confusing. But the last thing you want is to either overpay for features your team doesn’t need, or mistakenly commit to a plan that breaks a workflow. I sat down with GitHub’s Senior Director of Product Marketing, Erdem Menges, to discuss all the features you get with GitHub’s Free plan, and when to consider moving to the Team plan. Kelsey: What is the most compelling feature of GitHub’s Free plan?
Career tips for beginner developers
Sometimes the physical act of starting can be the biggest obstacle in the way of reaching any goal. If you’re a beginner developer or just starting out in your career, you may feel overwhelmed with all the advice floating around. You might also have a fear of learning the wrong programming language (spoiler: not really a thing), intimidated by coding exams, or nervous about engaging in social media discussions. While all of these feelings are natural, there are several ways you can overcome them.
Breakfast With a Billion Emails
A smooth Black Friday is all we ask for By the time I had my breakfast at about 8am Pacific Standard Time (PST) each day during the Black Friday weekend, Twilio SendGrid had already processed more than 1B emails as calculated in US Eastern Standard Time (EST). Looking at the stats, we processed upwards of 16.5B emails from Thanksgiving to Cyber Monday, and upwards of 22.3B for the week starting on Tuesday before Thanksgiving. These are really good numbers for the business.
What Your Recipients Think of Spam
We’ve written a lot about how senders end up in the spam folder, and why Internet Service Providers (ISPs) place senders there. But what about recipients? What do they consider to be spam? And what influences them to mark your email as spam? We talked to recipients across the U.S. and U.K. to find out how they engage and interact with email.
20 Simple Ways to Repurpose Content to Boost Your Traffic
What if I told you that you could create 2x the high-quality content in 1/2 the time? More content, saved time, and increased traffic? I’m already starting to sound like a late-night infomercial. Gross. But seriously, this isn’t a fantasy. With content repurposing, more traffic with less effort is a dream you can make come true. Think about the last piece of content you created: blog post, guide, webinar, infographic, video, case study, or whatever it was. How long did it take you to create?
Holiday Email Marketing Best Practices for 2020 and Beyond
During the last few months of the year, we tend to burn the candle at both ends. We’re juggling Christmas shopping, family in town, end of year revenue goals, and email campaigns that need to perform well. That’s a lot of pressure for just a few months. While we can’t help with the holiday shopping (unless your S.O. wants a super cool email provider 😉), we can help you get your ducks in a row for your holiday email campaigns.
SendGrid's New Marketing Campaigns Update
As a marketer, email is a beloved channel in your communication toolkit for a reason: it offers an opportunity to personalize, tell stories, and invite conversation with recipients. Just as importantly, it performs, returning an average of $42 for every dollar invested (as any Email Service Provider will remind you). Today, we’re thrilled to announce our new-and-improved Marketing Campaigns is now generally available, making Twilio SendGrid the best solution to serve all of your email needs.
I’m Just Not That Into You: Why Recipients Unsubscribe From Your Email Marketing List
I recently went on an unsubscribe spree—when I go through my inbox and unsubscribe from any email marketing list that I no longer find relevant or valuable to me. After each mass unsubscribe, I start thinking about what caused me to end the relationship with my email admirer, because the majority of the time, I’ve shown interest and opted-into these programs. But then, sooner rather than later, I end up losing that interest and cutting things off.
Content Distribution or Newsletters for Email?
As a marketer you have likely spent copious amounts of time strategizing, creating, and polishing your promotional content for your email program. But how do you plan to share your content? Don’t sabotage that effort by treating your email distribution plan as an afterthought. If you’re unsure about what types of distribution methods suit your needs, you’re in luck, because your primary choices are broken down below by their benefits, differences, and considerations.
How To Create Customized And Contextual Email Campaigns
The email segment of one: otherwise known as hyper-personalization (or an email marketer’s holy grail). You reach it when you know so much about a recipient–what motivates them, what schedules they keep, why/when they spend–that every single communication you send is custom tailored to a particular individual. Although aspirational, marketing–and especially email marketing–has been evolving towards the segment of one for many years.
Unread Mail - Your 2017 Email Resolutions
Resolutions are challenging to keep, but the good news is I consider January to be more of a trial run anyway! To kick off February (and the rest of your year officially) we thought it may be helpful to offer a few quick resolutions for your email program to set you up for success in 2017.
3 Types Of Email Preference Centers
If you’ve been a SendGrid Blog subscriber for a while, you have probably read the mantra, “Send the right email, at the right time, to the right person, with the right frequency.” It’s easy to remember and helps our customers send wanted (and in many cases, loved) email to their subscribers.
Unread Mail: 2016 Review and 2017 Preview
Well, we all blinked and apparently this year’s on its way out of here tomorrow! We’ve had a wonderful time bringing all things email to your screen every other week and appreciate you tuning in to join us. In our last Unread Mail episode of 2016, Warren and I discuss a few of our favorite things that we worked on this year and reveal a few content assets to come in 2017.
SendGrid Achieves Advanced Partner Status in the AWS Partner Network
Today, we are thrilled to announce SendGrid’s achievement of becoming an AWS (Amazon Web Services) Advanced Partner in the AWS APN (Partner Network). This milestone represents a continuation of our commitment to the AWS platform and our customers.
2017: The Next BIG Thing is Email
I have been in the email industry for more than a decade now. During that time, while many parts of the email industry have changed, there are two fundamental things that have remained constant. First is the continued growth in the email channel. I went back and looked at the stats from SendGrid from when I started nearly 6 years ago. At that time, the company was a couple of years old and nearing a total of 20 billion emails sent to date. Today we are sending more than that in one month.
Meet The New Partner Marketplace and Magento E-Commerce Integration
It’s a big day for the SendGrid ecosystem–we have not one, but two major announcements! As of today, we are officially rolling out our new Partner Marketplace, as well as the release of a new integration with Magento–the worldwide leader in cloud digital commerce innovation.
Embed Videos in Your SendGrid Account With Viwom
There is no doubt that video effectively communicates a brand’s story and has the potential to draw in a big audience. But putting videos in your emails can be a total pain. Issues such as differences in operating systems and email clients–few of which support the necessary HTML5 tag–prevents seamless integration and video display which can result in a fallback image, or in some cases–a black static image.
Response to Trump's Executive Order on Immigration
Note: Yesterday, SendGrid CEO, Sameer Dholakia sent an email to all SendGrid employees regarding President Trump’s executive order on immigration. We’d like to share it with you here. Gridders, As you know, this past Friday, President Trump issued an executive order restricting immigration from seven Muslim-majority countries.
Email for Startups: Ready to Start Marketing?
Now that we’ve covered choosing an ESP and sending transactional mail, it’s time to tackle marketing emails. If transactional emails are administrative and straightforward, think of marketing emails as the space to get a little creative with your brand. Email marketing is a great tool for startups to grow customer engagement and brand awareness. Keep reading for our top email marketing advice and best practices.
Don't Be Mistaken for a Spammer: An Internet and Messaging Abuse Primer
Sun Tzu, the brilliant 6th century general and strategist, wrote, “Know your enemy and know yourself and you will always be victorious.” In the spirit of his sage words, we created a handbook to help legitimate marketers understand the Internet and messaging abuse landscape. Email spammers send their poison cargo in varied methods from the slow loris approach to that of a snowshoe attack.
How to Email Blast Without Getting Blacklisted
Planning on sending an email blast to your entire email list? Unfortunately, this practice can be risky and may cause you to end up on an email blacklist. Email blacklists are notoriously challenging to get off of and require more resources and time than you may imagine. So, it’s worth it to take some extra time and precaution before you press send.
Keep it Simple: 4 Effective Emails for Marketers
More free time. More chocolate. More email? Yes, yes, and not quite. If you’re kicking off an email program, or are newer to email marketing, you may be feeling overwhelmed with all the email possibilities. It’s ok. You have to start somewhere. But that doesn’t mean starting everywhere. Below are four common and effective marketing emails types to keep in your email toolbox as your email program starts to grow. 1.
A New Map of Industry Email Volume in Each State
In order to create the Global Email Benchmark Report, we looked at billions of different pieces of data. While the report is a great resource to compare your email metrics to the rest of your industry, we had even more information we wanted to share on a more granular scale. In addition to the types of devices used, we also looked at where the email recipients of different industries are opening and engaging with email on a state level.
Updated Tips and Tricks to Stay Out of the Spam Folder
Why does my sent email end up the spam folder? If you work in email, this probably sounds all too familiar–and not in a comforting way. Spam is perhaps the most common, agonizing, and misunderstood email delivery issue facing our customers, or any email sender for that matter. And for fair reason. Up to 20% of all email (even for legitimate, non-spammers) ends up in the spam folder.
Orange, Wanadoo, and Freeserve Email Address Closures
Since you are reading this, it’s likely you already know that email addresses at certain Orange, Wanadoo, and Freeserve domains will soon be no more and you simply want to know what you as a sender should do about it. I will certainly touch on how senders should address this change below. But first, in case you aren’t clear on what’s happening, I’ll quickly recap the issue.
SendCloud and SendGrid Partner to Simplify Email in China
As our partners grow their businesses, they’re typically faced with an ever-increasing amount of challenges and complexities. SendGrid’s partnership program helps our partners overcome those challenges, as it relates to digital communications, to ultimately enhance and build their businesses. SendGrid and SendCloud are excited to announce a strategic partnership that simplifies digital communication with customers into and out of China.
Recent Updates to Marketing Campaigns
Just in time for holiday sending season, we’re happy to share a few recent enhancements to Marketing Campaigns. If you’re not sure what sets Marketing Campaigns apart from other ESPs, take a moment to watch this quick video which highlights key features like: Powerful, yet easy-to-use segmentation A flexible campaign building interface Actionable statistics and much more—all designed to help you increase retention and engagement with ease.
Mail Meet Inbox: Updated IP Warmup Schedule and Guide
If you’re scaling your email program and growing your recipient list, it’s a good practice to add additional IPs to accommodate your mail streams. This is an important milestone because your IP is one of the most crucial factors in determining whether your email makes it to the inbox. If you don’t properly warm up your new IPs, the Internet Service Providers (ISPs) won’t deliver your email. Why? Because they’re not familiar with your sending patterns yet.
Beautiful Poetry Brought to You By Spam Email
Note: We want to share a recent poem written by SendGrid Deliverability Consultant, Will Boyd. The original version of this poem first appeared in the Literary Journal, Suspect Press, Issue 15 and was created with subject lines from real spam emails. As much as possible the lines have not been altered in any way.
Don't Send Email From Domains You Don't Control
There’s a use case that we see developers implementing or asking about frequently, especially when building B2B apps. The service wants or needs to send emails on behalf of their customers. The sender wants these emails to appear as if they are coming from their client rather than the service itself. For example, consider a service that manages bookings for hotels. Each hotel wants to send updates, via emails generated by the booking service, to the people who are making the transactions.
Your Interactive Holiday Email Marketing Crash Course
Just in time for the holidays, we put together a little gift for our fellow email marketers, especially those who are just starting to build their first campaign. We compiled our top 26 email marketing tips in a fun, interactive guide filled with quizzes, downloadable checklists, videos, and more.
How To Set Up Email Unsubscribe Policies
Maintaining a good reputation for your recipient list is key to ensuring your emails reach the elusive Inbox. Think of a good deliverability rating like your credit score—consistency is key. Just as missed payments can bring you down, through consistent experiences with your recipient list (similar to consistent, on-time payments), you can improve and get back to where you want to be.
Sending Remarkable Email: An Interview With Chad White
We were thrilled when Chad White agreed to sit down for an interview with our CMO, Scott Heimes. Chad is the Research Director at Litmus (one of our favorite email testing companies) and the author of a book that we consider a true staple around here at SendGrid, Email Marketing Rules. Scott: You and I share the fact that we both started out as journalists. How does your journalism background help you advise on proper email strategies? Is there a connecting element there?
Best Practices To Improve Your Email Deliverability
Deliverablity means the rate at which emails actually make it to subscriber inboxes. Email deliverability failure is usually when an email went to the spam folder or was blocked by the ISP. How to improve email deliverability So, how do you make sure your email gets delivered? Luckily there are proven techniques to prevent failures and improve your email delivery rates for the long-term.
Black Friday and Cyber Monday by the Numbers
Talking about email at scale can be awkward; most people think of email from their end user perspective and experience using a webmail or desktop email client. That’s not how I think about email at scale. I look at scaling email something like this: sending one email is easy, even trivial. Sending 10 emails is also simple, you just put 10 email addresses into the TO, CC, or BCC line. Sending 100 emails is tedious but also easily achieved. What about sending 1,000 emails? 1,000,000? 100,000,000?
104 Email Marketing Myths, Experiments, and Inspiration
A New Email Marketing Guide From SendGrid and HubSpot! Our newest email marketing resource was co-authored by SendGrid and HubSpot in order to help and inspire email marketers before they send their next campaign. 104 Email Marketing Myths, Experiments, and Inspiration provides over one hundred different tips and ideas that will jump-start your email marketing program, and drive more engagement and results with your contacts.
Honoring Opt-Outs is Good Business
“To unsub or not to unsub?” Is that the question? The truth is, that isn’t a question at all, it’s the law. But I’m getting ahead of myself. Let me explain. A few weeks ago, my former colleague and friend Lee Isensee, the Director of Product over at Search Discovery, pinged me on Twitter with a simple question: At first, I couldn’t quite comprehend what Lee was asking me. Wait, what?! Increasing frequency and volume of email during an unsub period? Is there really such a thing as an unsub period?
The Difference Between Email Drip and Automation Campaigns
As your email marketing becomes more sophisticated, you’ll likely want to send more advanced and personalized messages. But as you strategize and start to build campaigns, you may find the distinction between email automation and drip campaigns a little muddy…are they essentially the same thing? Does my ESP provide support for both? Which tactic would work best for me and my email program?
3 Email Marketing Automation Mistakes To Avoid
Email marketing automation simplifies a lot of elements of your job as a marketer and makes you generally more efficient when planning and executing your campaigns. But despite this, it’s wise to be aware of some of the risks so you don’t let your wins go to waste. This post breaks down some of the more common email marketing automation mistakes, and how you can avoid them.
Full Send SMS: Using Twilio, Python, and the WordPress API to Send Blog Updates
In case you missed it, SendGrid recently joined forces with Twilio, and the stoke level around the office is high as we start to acclimate and learn more about Twilio’s powerful product offerings, as well as their internal employee traditions. One of those traditions is building an app on the Twilio platform, demoing it in front of the company, and receiving one of those coveted red track jackets in return.
Marketing Automation vs. Email Marketing: Which is Right for Your Program?
The difference between email marketing and marketing automation can seem a bit puzzling at times. Are they even different or is one just an extension of the other? (hint: sort of, yes). But the distinction between the two couldn’t be more important as you plan and decide what strategies make the most sense for your marketing program.
Email Drip Campaign Best Practices and Tips
Email drip campaigns illustrate a valuable life principle that I’ve come to accept and embrace: sometimes it’s wise to be lazy in certain areas of your life so you can push harder in others. Automatic and programmable coffee makers, for example, afford me more sleep and one less task in the morning (lazy) while still arriving at work with copious amounts of caffeine pumping through every vein and pore (most definitely smart).
Automated Emails: 3 Ideas to Get You Started
Wanting to automate your email sending, but feeling *a wee bit* overwhelmed? While email automation drives personalized messages at scale, it also requires some pre-work and strategy to see positive results. I have good news though. You can gain many benefits from email automation even when you’re just starting out. No matter how big your email list or how much time and resources you devote to email marketing automation, you can see a difference in your sending with simple email automation flows.
Why Buying Email Lists is a Bad Idea & How to Grow a Healthy Email List
If you’re a marketer, you’re likely juggling several tasks at once such as feeding the sales funnel, increasing brand awareness, driving engagement, and creating valuable content pieces. And if you use email as part of your marketing program (and I seriously hope you do), you have likely been solicited by companies that want you to buy an email list.
What is Retention Marketing? And How to Use it in Your Email Program
Acquiring new leads is often the top priority for many marketing teams. But only focusing on acquisition marketing strategies is like just buying a car because it has a shiny paint job. It’s only the start. When retention marketing is executed correctly, your leads and prospects remain interested, engaged, and more likely to stay with your brand (and ultimately become more lucrative customers).
Best Practices For Writing Email Marketing Subject Lines That Work
Measuring the success of your email subject line can be more straightforward compared to other email metrics. In most cases an open = a win. But that doesn’t mean that writing effective, clever, and persuasive subject lines is easy (it’s not). Subject lines force you to write in an active, succinct, and creative way. And for this reason, those one-liners can be one of the more challenging email elements to master.
New Best Practice Guide: Automated Email Strategies
Interested in adding automated email in your email marketing program, but don’t know where to start or are unsure how sophisticated you want to get?
4 Email Blast Mistakes and How to Avoid Them
The human touch is both a blessing and a curse for an email marketer. On the one hand, creating and sending email marketing campaigns (aka email blasts) can be effective at reaching and engaging with large audiences. But on the other, as with all humans, we are prone to making mistakes. Although email mistakes are never 100% avoidable, we’re here to help you get as close as possible! The following mistakes and best practice tips below will help you send mistake-free email blasts.
New Guide Drop: Email A/B Testing and CTA Best Practices & Strategies
We’re happy to announce that we’ve released a new interactive best practice guide to help you hone your A/B testing strategies and perfect your email copy calls to action (CTAs). Your Guide to A/B Testing and Optimizing Your Call To Action is a deep dive on both crucial topics that can elevate your email program, leverage data, and persuade your recipients to convert. But why A/B testing and CTAs you ask?
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