Churn Buster relies on Postmark for its critical emails
This month we introduce you to Matt Goldman, the founder of Churn Buster. Churn Buster is a proven set of tools to help you regain control of your churn, by resolving failed payments and delivering automated support to your customers.
Can you tell us a little bit about your experience and the work you do? #
We've been starting and running internet businesses for the past 10 years or so. Prior to Churn Buster, we were building an analytics product atop Stripe's billing platform, and we always struggled to find product-market fit. After a couple years, we identified a core problem that all of our customers faced: recurring failed payments. Around that time, we acquired Churn Buster, and have been focused on growing it ever since.
Churn Buster connects to any payment processor, detects when payments fail, and attempts to recover that potentially-lost revenue. Often, that involves contacting the customer on your behalf. As you can imagine, getting those emails past automated radar (spam filters), and human radar (phishing concerns), is critical. And Postmark is our chosen partner for accomplishing both on behalf of our clients.
We've architected our sending infrastructure to rely heavily on Postmark, and we couldn't be happier.
How are you using Postmark on projects today? #
We only use outbound email. We have a very deep integration with the bounce and open webhooks, storing a copy of all raw data on our end, so that we can combine it with recovery analytics and compare the performance of campaigns from a macro-level, as well as on a micro-level.
We also use the DNS options you provide to send email on behalf of our customers without any mention of Churn Buster, fully white-label.
The Postmark dashboard (along with the recent improvements) have proven hugely useful over the years to our support and success team. Being able to see a detailed log of exactly what was sent, when, and to whom, has been critical for us.
We have rich internal dashboards, as well as customer dashboards, but Postmark is where we look when we need to connect the dots.
The templates feature has also been wonderful for simplifying our monthly email digest sends. Being able to send in a collection of per-account performance data to be displayed in a nice template is really a great experience.
If you could add one feature to Postmark, what would it be? #
Multiple tags per email. This would allow us to run deeper analysis within Postmark about how different types of emails perform. Currently, we only tag accounts ("account_1"). But it'd be great to tag other links like which number email it is in the sequence. To answer questions like, what's the open rate per-customer of email #1 vs email #3.
If you could give fellow developers one piece of advice about how to implement and manage their transactional email, what would it be? #
Use webhooks to store bounce and open data on your servers. We continually think of new ways to use this data, and having years of raw logs is wonderful for giving new features a great visual start.
Why did you choose Postmark to deliver your transactional email? #
When we acquired Churn Buster, it was using Mandrill. Just a few short months after acquiring, they announced they were shutting down a service that we relied heavily on.
We had used Postmark lightly in the past, but never conducted a deep integration like we knew we'd need to for Churn Buster.
After some deep research and experimentation with competitors, it became clear that there really was no competition for companies that depend on transactional emails making it to the inbox.
We integrated deeply with Postmark years ago, and have been 100% thrilled with our choice ever since.
