SmartrMail taps Twilio’s Programmable SMS platform and SendGrid’s Email platform to enable e-commerce merchants to conduct advanced email marketing strategies

SmartrMail is a company that aims to make a marketer’s life easier by providing the right tools to conduct strategic email marketing campaigns in the simplest and most efficient way possible. SmartrMail was initially developed in 2016, to boost sales of Bluethumb, an online art marketplace. Bluethumb, founded by the same team as SmartrMail, needed an easy email marketing app for small to medium e-commerce merchants but found that existing tools were either too basic or didn’t have the great functionality and features (i.e., personalisation) required to create compelling emails quickly. Today, more than nine thousand small-to-medium e-commerce businesses are leveraging SmartrMail’s integrated email app to create automated outreach to customers such as welcome emails, abandoned cart reminders, product review requests, newsletters, and many more.

Most of SmartrMail’s customers are mainly in the United States, Australia, and Canada, followed by New Zealand, western Europe, Japan, India, Singapore, and the UK; and cover just about any industry including fashion, beauty, and electronics to name a few. With more brands coming online due to the global pandemic, e-commerce sales have increased, and so has the need for email marketing. SmartrMail has therefore been growing rapidly as a result. Email volumes have doubled since the beginning of 2021 – having gone from 50 million a month to 80 million today, with the expectation of hitting 100 million by the end of the year. This growth means that SmartrMail needed more cost-efficient and robust email and SMS solutions in order to support customer expansions. They naturally turned to Twilio for their SendGrid Email platform and Programmable SMS platform.

SMS Marketing Offers a Large Untapped Opportunity for E-commerce Merchants in Australia

Recognising that SMS in Australia was being underserved because legacy technologies weren’t allowing e-commerce merchants to fully take advantage of SMS’ full potential for marketing, SmartrMail chose the Twilio Programmable SMS platform first. Twilio’s solution provided the right developer-friendly resources and tools that could enable more advanced SMS features at the right price.

Twilio worked with us to keep the SMS rates low for Australia, so that we can pass on the cost savings to our customers as well,” said Josh Reyes, Head of Growth at SmartrMail. “These savings, in turn, allow e-commerce merchants to see a larger ROI on their marketing efforts, compared to the older legacy providers. We look forward to working with Twilio on region-specific rates so that we can offer the same savings to the other countries we plan to expand to in the near future.

SmartrMail looks forward to launching their SMS offering this year and they are currently projecting 200,000 messages to be sent in the first month, and expect that number to double to 400,000 within three months. After eight months, they expect approximately 3 million messages to be sent a month.

With Email Volume Doubling - Twilio SendGrid Ensures Simple-to-Use and On-time Delivery for SmartrMail’s customers

Additionally, SmartrMail chose Twilio for their email solution because it is of utmost importance for SmartrMail to provide their merchant customers with an email solution that would be delivered and received in less than two minutes. And Twilio SendGrid is the right solution that will enable these merchants to deliver an exceptional email experience to their customers and know that their emails will arrive on time.

“We looked at numerous providers but knew Twilio was the market leader with unsurpassed levels of expertise and support, including extensive documentation and guides for implementing both SMS and email solutions,” continued Reyes. “Much of our development team was already familiar with Twilio’s APIs and tools, which helped minimise the learning curve and allowed us to integrate much quicker.”

In just one week, SmartrMail was able to integrate Twilio’s SendGrid Email APIs into their email marketing app. Prior to deploying in September, SmartrMail was sending 80 million emails a month and they expect that number to double every 12 months based on past trends.

In addition, Twilio’s SendGrid Email APIs also enable some of SmartrMail’s email personalisation capabilities. For instance, there are merge fields that allow for certain customer data to be highlighted or pulled in, such as their rewards or points, or the last product they may have purchased. These features eventually led SmartrMail to choose Twilio’s solution for its ease of use and expansive capabilities.

SmartrMail believes that while social media is popular and glamorous, email marketing continues to be the most effective and profitable digital marketing channel in reaching customers. Open rates are typically higher, especially for SMS which is a growing platform. SMS’ open rates are almost 95% and this translates to an increase in customer engagement and ultimately to more sales. This bodes well for SmartrMail as SMS is their first step towards offering omnichannel solutions and they foresee integrating Whatsapp Business API from Twilio so they can also offer Whatsapp services in the near future.

“We look forward to working with Twilio on implementing additional communication channels, and creating a plan that suits the needs of our growing business,” continued Reyes. “As we expand to other countries, Twilio’s global presence, scale, and capabilities will enable us to quickly be up and running to support additional small-to-medium e-commerce merchants in places like Brazil.”