Data quality, marketing automation, and an under-appreciated feline
This piece was first emailed to 64k Postmark subscribers on Jun 7, 2023.
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Hi friend,
Welcome to another issue of Postmark’s monthly newsletter, “Happy Sending,” in which we bring you industry news, useful tools, and tips for sending great emails—plus the occasional update about our product and what it can do for you.
This month you’ll hear about data quality, marketing automation, and some recent product updates in Postmark. And if you are a cat person, you will have opinions about an odd authentication trend we’ve noticed... 🐈
Industry news and useful tools #
Today’s section is curated by Rob Kaczanowski, Growth Marketing Lead at Postmark, who calls himself “a dad to two large dogs, aspiring sailor, constant redecorator, rooftop gardener, and whatever you call a person who loves board games.”
Here is what Rob recommends that you check out, and why:
A wonderful exploration of the significance of credibility in transmitting knowledge—and how the shift to the Modern Data Stack is as much a cultural transition as it is a technical one.
This was a spicy one. As businesses scale, data teams are confronted with increasing amounts of organizational complexity, which in turn erodes data quality and trust.
Layoffs push down scores on Glassdoor: this is how companies respond
An insightful look into the dynamics of online reviews and how businesses—in this case, Glassdoor—have incentives that might be at odds with maintaining transparency and authenticity.
A tactical guide to using dbt snapshots to overcome key data being overwritten and start tracking trends over time—something we’re facing at Postmark.
Words of wisdom from a Postmark customer #
You may know that Postmark has been part of ActiveCampaign since 2022, and they do a lot of things we don’t—including marketing automation, visual builders, and CRM. If that’s something you need but don’t quite know where to start, our guest this month might be the right person to talk to.
Let’s hear it from Kay Peacey, who calls herself a “teacher (but fun!) for training & support who hates doing anything the hard way.”
Can you tell us a little bit about yourself and the work you do? #
I’ve always aimed to find the easiest, fastest way to get stuff done, and then spread the word by teaching other people how. You can read that as laziness, but I like to call it efficiency! At the grand age of 45, I stumbled into ActiveCampaign and it was love at first sight - it’s the dream tech to automate all the things, and a profoundly liberating tool for SMEs to scale up without breaking a sweat. My mission is to help ActiveCampaign users get more value from it without crying, swearing, or giving up - so they can make their email marketing dreams come true and grow their awesome business.
How are you using Postmark on projects today? #
First up, I use Postmark on my websites to send emails for all the user stuff - like orders and password resets - hooray to no more missed delivery there!
And then there’s the incredible Postmark CX integration with ActiveCampaign, which makes it super-easy to send transactional emails via automations. I’m excited to use this more in my own business, and even more excited to be showing other people how and when to use it.
If you could give folks one piece of advice about how to implement and manage their email, what would it be? #
Emails that don’t get delivered can’t do anything to help your customers, your business, or yourself. So you need to pay attention to deliverability - know who the players are and how the game is played for your sending tech, so you can be on top inbox form with every send. It’s never too late to make sure your emails are getting to the inbox, but sooner is better than later, so stop putting it off and go learn how to do it right - it’s not as hard as it looks, I promise.
🙌 We love to publish our customers’ stories. Would you like to be featured next month? Fill in this quick and extremely yellow form, just like Kay did, and we’ll make it happen.
Postmark news & updates #
What is transactional email?
#
You know how they say that “to assume makes an a*s of u and me”? In the spirit of not doing that, we won’t assume that just because you’re reading this newsletter you’re already familiar with transactional email—so here is a 3:29-minute YouTube clip where our head of Marketing, Justine, gives a comprehensive definition with a bunch of examples from her inbox:
TUTORIAL: retrieving large datasets with node.js #
Postmark’s Messages API allows you to programmatically retrieve data about the messages that have processed through your Postmark server. However, the Messages API’s search functionality can only return up to 10,000 results for a single search... but there is a workaround! And this tutorial will teach you how to write a node.js script to perform a search based on tag or by iterating over a date range.
The Retention Add-on is out 🚀 #
Postmark stores message content and activity data for 45 days by default. But what if 45 days are too many? Or too few?
Well, friends, here’s a reminder that you can now use our brand-new Retention Add-on, which gives you the flexibility to adjust retention between 7 and 365 days. This has been one of our most popular feature requests, and we hope it’s something you’ll like!
WordPress Plugin and CX App updates #
If you use Postmark’s WordPress plugin or the Postmark CX App for ActiveCampaign (or both), we just released some improvements to offer metadata support and content personalization. Check out this fresh product update!
Behind the scenes at Postmark 👀 #
We recently published a 10-minute authentication video series using kittens, puppies, and ducklings to explain SPF, DKIM, and DMARC standards… but one of the videos has proven to be way more successful than the others, and that just. doesn’t. seem. right.
The SPF kitten deserves better than that!
Until next time,*
Happy sending 💛
*Starting next month, you’ll see some new faces at the bottom of this email as I move on from Postmark and new folks join the team. It’s been fun hanging out in your inbox with this newsletter—thank you for reading!
