VSCO launched in 2011 with VSCO Film, preset filters for photographers. Since VSCO was selling these presets from their website, email was a really important component of their revenue process. If an email receipt went missing, someone needed to look up that transaction and resend their receipt. Every time a customer expects an email and doesn’t get it, it costs VSCO time or the trust of their customers. Today, VSCO sends millions of emails per month and they want to make sure every single email gets delivered.
We had the chance to talk to Joel Flory, co-founder and CEO of VSCO, about how they came to use Postmark and role email plays in their company.
“We didn’t realize just how popular VSCO Film would become, and when we started we used an email sending agent that was quickly shut down by our hosting provider,” said Joel. “It seemed like we were sending spam, because of the number of welcome and receipt emails we were sending within a very short time span. We knew email would play an important role in how we communicate with our users and needed to have a reliable method to send messages.”
Being unable to send email wasn’t an option for VSCO. “When we were shut down by the email service provider we’d been using, Postmark made it very easy to flip over and start sending right away. We were back up and running a matter of minutes by replacing the SMTP server we’d been using with one provided by Postmark.”
Once this quick migration to SMTP was done, the VSCO team was able to plan how they’d like to get more from their email activity in Postmark. “With our email up and running again, we were able to think through how we could use Postmark’s API to improve our transactional emails. Like I mentioned earlier, email is a key part of how we interact with our community. Whether it’s digital receipts, password reset requests, or account verification when someone signs up, being able to track how changes we make impact how people interact with our emails plays an important part in reaching our goals.”
The VSCO team loves being able to keep track of how changes to their emails improve their users’ experience, but it’s just as important they are able to make sure every email arrives as expected. “Understanding what types of emails are bouncing, being marked as spam, or being blocked by an ISP makes it easy to know when an email was sent and what happened to it. On top of all the tracking info, in almost four years with Postmark, I can’t remember a single time an outage impacted our business."
“When you step back and look at everything Postmark provides, it has everything you’d want if you were building out your own email infrastructure. Instead of it being one part of our stack we have to fight with and maintain, Postmark takes care of everything for us. Any time we’ve had a question or had a snag, their support team has always been fantastic. They either know the answer to a question straight away, or they dig in and get to the bottom of it with the entire team."
