When I joined MessageBird back in December 2021, I didn’t realize the breadth of product offerings that our customers use. As you may be aware, Bird's product offerings have gone through many changes over the past few years. As I learned each product, I kept trying to piece them together in my mind. How and why would a client combine Bird’s products together? What if a client wants to use one of our solutions but not the others?
As I began to learn more about the email and messaging space, I thought about how a typical email campaign flow might look and put together the chart below:
Utilizing this visual chart, we can begin to break down each of the processes and see how they all come together utilizing Bird’s offerings.
Starting from the customer perspective, a consumer signs up to receive updates from a brand. To determine that the email is a legitimate email address, an organization can use both double opt-in and Bird Recipient Validation.
Recipient Validation Tool
Bird Recipient Validation allows for real-time checking to validate whether an email address is valid, risky, undeliverable, neutral, or simply misspelled as a typo. This can be done via an API during the sign-up process, or as a batch check via an excel file. Additional attributes are provided for each email address, checking for disposable domains, role-based email addresses, and free domains. Once a consumer has signed up for a mailing list and their email address is determined to be valid, their email would then be placed in a database.
So now a user signed up for the newsletter, but who creates that and how do they do it?
Content Creation and Management
Email Design System Studio (previously Taxi for Email) enables content creation and marketing teams to streamline the creation process, reducing campaign production time. Not only can you easily create and manage content, but also, the core of Taxi allows for endless customizability and permission management. For example, if a designer should only use a specific color scheme and fonts for a creative, these can be permissioned so that only these specific colors/fonts can be used.
This allows for proactive brand management, reducing the need to validate before every send. Email Design Studio also allows for streamlined communication and approval within the app itself. Once done with the creative, this can be exported into either a campaign manager or an ESP. We have many connectors and the ability to dynamically set tags based on where and how you are exporting this content. This brings us to our next product Bird Cloud Sending.
Sending
Bird Cloud Sending is the world’s leading email sending and intelligent analytics platform. With flexible APIs and real-time actionable analytics, Bird provides robust scalability and expert support to drive optimized customer engagement and growth for today’s apps and services. With Bird Signals and Deliverability Analytics, MessageBird offers over 50+ metrics to stay on top of both delivery and deliverability.
Within Bird is also the ability to monitor pixel and click-tracking data. With the Bird Deliverability Analytics add-on, deliverability based on consumers’ experience and licensed mailbox provider placement data is brought directly into Bird Reporting. To dive even deeper into deliverability we move over to our next Bird product, Inbox Tracker.
Deliverability
Inbox Tracker is the only analytics product that reports deliverability based on actual consumers’ experience in addition to licensed mailbox provider placement data, intelligent seeds, and traditional seeds. With over 100 internal checks covering 30 key areas of sending programs, your organization can ensure maximum inbox placement of emails.
Organizations can also track their competition’s emails with another of Bird’s products, Competitive Tracker.
Competition
Competitive Tracker is an email marketing intelligence tool that actively tracks millions of domains across 200,000 brands in 100+ industries. This allows organizations to benchmark performance, gain insight into competitors’ emails, plan for seasonality changes, and identify areas of improvement by comparing email performance against rival brands.
Putting It All Together: Bird’s Products Combined
Finally, what would an example look like for someone who uses all of our offerings?
First, a piece of content would be created in Taxi and then exported to Bird Cloud as a template. Then, the Bird API can be used to send the created template as a transmission to users. If needed, a third-party campaign solution can be used prior to sending through Bird. Once this is sent, Bird Signals can be used to look at the analytics for this email. If we want to go deeper into deliverability for this email, we can then use Inbox Tracker to see what happened to this email after it hit the user’s inbox. And finally, if we wanted to see how this email compared to the competition, Competitive Tracker would be used to benchmark this campaign against similar brands.
We are happy to discuss how any of these platforms can help transform your business. If you would like more information about Bird’s products combined – or used separately – please reach out to us.
~Zach Samuels, Bird Senior Solutions Engineer