Creating a custom engagement tool with Twilio SendGrid
Time to read: 2 minutes
MySmartPrice is a price comparison and product discovery platform that helps users make the right shopping decision by providing real-time information about product pricing and nearby availability. Founded in 2010, MySmartPrice is an Indian based startup that serves 11 million unique and over 20 million total monthly website visitors.
Arun Chinnachamy, VP of Engineering at MySmartPrice, leads the team managing the email program, which is critical for driving customer engagement and retention.
“Using Twilio SendGrid’s customizable APIs, MySmartPrice has the freedom to fully integrate email with their in-house systems. As a result, they’ve built an impressive email program that’s optimized for their business–enjoying the confidence that comes from having SendGrid’s delivery infrastructure as the backbone.”
Challenge
Customers receiving unwanted email and unsubscribing is a huge risk to long-term customer engagement for MySmartPrice.
Arun and his team are therefore incredibly thoughtful about creating personalized content their recipients value. His team wanted to build a custom campaign management tool to programmatically determine email content and frequency based on real-time user engagement and preferences.
Requirements for this tool included being able to:
- Predict which products will appeal to users based on past email engagement
- Intelligently adjust promotional content to avoid fatigue (to reduce unsubscribes and improve deliverability) as seen in the example chart below
Solution
MySmartPrice built their custom email platform on top of Twilio SendGrid’s delivery engine, which allowed them to achieve whatever capabilities their business required.
Additionally, MySmartPrice’s email analytics program informs Arun and his team about user behavior and the health of their program overall.
They use both the actionable analytics provided within Twilio SendGrid’s customer portal as well as the Event Webhook to easily track and digest information such as spam rates, unsubscribes, engagement, and mobile device usage across their customer base.
“The minute we have the data in the dashboard, we monitor engagement and stop sending to people who don’t engage,” Arun says.“We only send to people who engage.”
Results
Armed with data, Arun and his team created a highly effective engagement program with:
Email continues to be a key business driver at MySmartPrice. According to Arun, “Email is very important for us. We send 50M emails and get 2M customers back…Without email, it’s difficult to get people coming back to us.”
Bottom Line
Twilio SendGrid is a perfect match for MySmartPrice’s triggered and marketing email program because it’s:
- Customizable: The developer-friendly API is easy to integrate with and allows precise functionality to fit any unique business need.
- Analytical: With a strategic analytics dashboard and Event Webhook, MySmartPrice gets the in-depth engagement analytics it needs to understand customer behavior.
- Scalable: Twilio SendGrid’s proven ability to scale ensures smart email growth.
“Email = Twilio SendGrid. Email as a system has created a tremendous advantage for us. It’s the only way I can reach out to gain repeat users every day. It’s not a guarantee, and if I send out a bad email a customer may not come back, but there is no other system I can use that can scale this well.”
