8 ms·

Show HN: Our 5 month project Airtime for Email

66 points by dshipper 15y ago

meltzerj 15y ago
Oh yeah
kiwidrew 15y ago
What if the recipient's user agent does not display images? At least with a text-based signature, the message still goes through, even if it isn't fancy. Actually, as a recipient, I'd be annoyed to have this trigger gmail's "show images?" dialog, only to find upon choosing "display images" that the only thing I get is... a marketing message from the sender. That said, I still love the idea!
- dshipper 15y ago
  Thanks for the feedback! If the recipient's user agent doesn't display images we don't record an impression, and so it doesn't show up in the analytics. I totally understand that it might be annoying to only get a marketing message from clicking "Display Images". I guess the way I look at it is that it's a chance for companies you're already interacting with to tell you things about themselves that you might not already know - so it might be annoying or if you like the company it might be cool too. It's also an amazing platform for organizations like schools, charities and political campaigns to do outreach with. For example, a charity can have their big donors install this in their signature and have a unified, centrally controlled donation message going out every day that's always current and updated. Thanks again for the feedback!
  - jorgem 15y ago
    There was some guy, on HN recently, who could convert any image to CSS (kindof hacky) -- CSS is always displayed, even if browser won't show images. You will wouldn't have analytics, but at least the ad would display.
    - dshipper 15y ago
      Wow I'd love to look at that project. The one problem is that we don't always have access to the actual HTML of the emails being sent out. For example, you can integrate Airtime with GMail but Gmail doesn't actually allow you to play with HTML tags. You have to do it by inserting an image and then linking the image by hand. Effectively it's the same result, but it really limits our options in terms of styling etc.
    - ceejayoz 15y ago
      CSS support varies hugely across clients, and even modern ones like Gmail have odd quirks. You can't count on it rendering like on a regular website - hell, to look good in most clients you still have to use tables.
atourgates 15y ago
This looks like a fantastic premise, but could where can I get more details about how it's implemented? I work at an ad agency, and every single client we have wants a fancy email signature, but it's always a huge pain in the ass to get it implemented in a way that works properly company-wide, and looks good across multiple email clients.
- dshipper 15y ago
  Thanks! It's just a simple HTML snippet that gets inserted into their emails. The snippet contains an image that we change on the server side. It's gets a lot more complicated than that, but that's the basic premise. I'd love to chat more some time - feel free email me at dan@airtimehq.com if you're interested!
benjlang 15y ago
Wisestamp much?
- dshipper 15y ago
  You can definitely use this with WiseStamp although that's not the recommended path to integration :)
gsiener 15y ago
Cool concept, I can imagine this getting into enterprise emails everywhere. Anyone interested in rolling their own should check out Movable Ink (http://movableink.com http://movableink.com) -- dynamic content for email.
- dshipper 15y ago
  Thanks for the feedback. Yep Moveable Ink has similar technology and they're a great startup. Our product is just a bit more targeted to marketing :)
matdwyer 15y ago
I use standard images (three of them) linked to my Facebook, Testimonials, and Twitter - they do end up getting a lot of hits so I see the benefit in something like this. Not sure if I would go through the hassles of tracking email opens for my conversations with people though. I also find that when the emails are coming back it is quite annoying to have all the image placeholders in the conversations.
- dshipper 15y ago
  Good point. We tried doing something where if the same email thread was loading multiple banners we would only serve one - but good email services like GMail load an image once and then display it multiple times throughout the thread thus defeating our anti-annoyance measures :)
- bks 15y ago
  Agreed on having the standard icons in the footer. I do like the idea of being able to update the marketing message so if someone opens an old email - they are current with the brand message. I also include my photograph in every outgoing message - a little corny, but it does help at subsequent networking events.
AznHisoka 15y ago
Who's the target market for this? Most marketing teams want analytics on the actual links in the email body, rather than the signature. And if they had that in place, then tracking the signature is pretty simple addon.
- dshipper 15y ago
  Any company with employees that send out a lot of email every day. So for example if you have a big sales team, the marketing department doesn't have to tell them "Ok this week we want to talk more about widgetX" instead all they have to do is upload one banner and instantly every email that the sales team sends out has a banner a banner talking about the widgetX". It's also great for charities, schools and political campaigns to raise money.
  - AznHisoka 15y ago
    I don't think that would be as effective as a single email devoting to marketing it, so the value of your product wouldn't be as high. For charities, yes I see the value, although I'm not sure if that is a huge revenue source.
    - mediaman 15y ago
      As someone with a decent annual investment in salespeople and customer service staffers, this product looks incredibly valuable, and one of our marketing members is looking into becoming a subscriber because it solves an important hassle point for her. Broad 'newsletter' emails don't get read as much, because they're not going to contain specific relevant information to customers' existing orders or other information they need. In contrast, a service like this allows a little promotional banner to be shown to customers who are almost certainly going to be reading the email, because they are placing an order, checking up on an order, or inquiring about a product. And below the email from the salesperson/CSR, you can promote a relevant product or message that is highly likely to get read. The traditional way has been to badger salespeople until they change their signature, which doesn't work very well. Now, it's all automatic. To the founders: there are a lot of people on here who seem not to understand your product. That's OK, I don't think they're in your target market and don't appear to have the painpoint you're solving. In most of traditional corporate America, this is a big pain point you're solving, especially for the poor marketing people who are tired of trying to get those signatures updated.
a3_nm 15y ago
How does this work? I thought that most email clients these days tried to avoid tracking by refusing to display external images by default. Am I missing something?
- dshipper 15y ago
  It's just an image in the bottom of the email. Many clients do avoid tracking but many don't. For example on an iPhone all images are loaded by default. Additionally a lot of people press "Display Images Below". Initially I thought that images being blocked would be the biggest hurdle to this project, but it was being used prelaunch by 20 customers and we served over 110,000 impressions during that time (an impression isn't recorded if the image is blocked).
  - mbesto 15y ago
    Not to discredit you, but this doesn't sounds very compelling: "Many clients do avoid tracking but many don't." Any percentage number to back up that claim? 110,000 impressions out of how many? Also what's the conversion? Would be interesting to see more research into this (and articulated on the website). Other than, looks coo1! Good luck!
    - dshipper 15y ago
      Thanks for the feedback! It's impossible for us to tell what percentage of the total number of emails sent the 110,000 impressions represents because our server only gets hit when images are loaded. If images aren't loaded our server is never hit, and it's as if the email was never sent. The total CTR across all 110,000 impressions was 0.42%, however we log an impression both when an email is being composed and when it is read on the other end. So if we discount the false positives for composing impressions then the CTR jumps to around 0.91% which is incredibly high given that the banners are not at all optimized. We're working on better analytics to be able to separate legitimate impressions from composing impressions, but don't quite have that functionality yet. Thanks again for commenting I really appreciate it!
spung 15y ago
Great idea, and I love your guys' design! Did you guys design it yourselves or use a toolkit?
- dshipper 15y ago
  Thanks so much! It's mostly done by hand but the buttons are from Foundation: http://foundation.zurb.com/ http://foundation.zurb.com/
eiji 15y ago
A real "About Us" section would be nice. No marketing unit is going to do business with two twitter accounts. And IMHO don't use twitter accounts with your position on SOPA. 95% of your customers don't care or don't (want to) know.
- dshipper 15y ago
  Great points all. About Us section is coming ASAP. Agree on the SOPA banners as well. Thanks for taking the time to let us know.
prawn 15y ago
Viewing the site on a landscape iPad, all you see is the first screenshot and a pricing button. There's no visible scrollbar or hint at more content further down the page. At first, I thought it was a bit strange that you would throw people straight to your pricing info without further explanation - only realised there was more on the front door when I came back to it a second time. Might be worth tweaking the sizing so in this format you get a small hint that the content continues?
- dshipper 15y ago
  Thanks for the heads up we'll check it out!
jnorthrop 15y ago
It looks like a nice service but you really need a privacy policy. What data are you storing, what are you going to do with that data and what can I do to opt-in or out? I can't imagine many organizations getting clearance to use this without that.
- dshipper 15y ago
  Excellent point. Added to our todo list :)

66 points by dshipper 15y ago

Oh yeah

What if the recipient's user agent does not display images? At least with a text-based signature, the message still goes through, even if it isn't fancy. Actually, as a recipient, I'd be annoyed to have this trigger gmail's "show images?" dialog, only to find upon choosing "display images" that the only thing I get is... a marketing message from the sender. That said, I still love the idea!

dshipper 15y ago
Thanks for the feedback! If the recipient's user agent doesn't display images we don't record an impression, and so it doesn't show up in the analytics. I totally understand that it might be annoying to only get a marketing message from clicking "Display Images". I guess the way I look at it is that it's a chance for companies you're already interacting with to tell you things about themselves that you might not already know - so it might be annoying or if you like the company it might be cool too. It's also an amazing platform for organizations like schools, charities and political campaigns to do outreach with. For example, a charity can have their big donors install this in their signature and have a unified, centrally controlled donation message going out every day that's always current and updated. Thanks again for the feedback!
- jorgem 15y ago
  There was some guy, on HN recently, who could convert any image to CSS (kindof hacky) -- CSS is always displayed, even if browser won't show images. You will wouldn't have analytics, but at least the ad would display.
  - dshipper 15y ago
    Wow I'd love to look at that project. The one problem is that we don't always have access to the actual HTML of the emails being sent out. For example, you can integrate Airtime with GMail but Gmail doesn't actually allow you to play with HTML tags. You have to do it by inserting an image and then linking the image by hand. Effectively it's the same result, but it really limits our options in terms of styling etc.
  - ceejayoz 15y ago
    CSS support varies hugely across clients, and even modern ones like Gmail have odd quirks. You can't count on it rendering like on a regular website - hell, to look good in most clients you still have to use tables.

atourgates 15y ago

This looks like a fantastic premise, but could where can I get more details about how it's implemented? I work at an ad agency, and every single client we have wants a fancy email signature, but it's always a huge pain in the ass to get it implemented in a way that works properly company-wide, and looks good across multiple email clients.

dshipper 15y ago
Thanks! It's just a simple HTML snippet that gets inserted into their emails. The snippet contains an image that we change on the server side. It's gets a lot more complicated than that, but that's the basic premise. I'd love to chat more some time - feel free email me at dan@airtimehq.com if you're interested!

benjlang 15y ago

Wisestamp much?

dshipper 15y ago
You can definitely use this with WiseStamp although that's not the recommended path to integration :)

gsiener 15y ago

Cool concept, I can imagine this getting into enterprise emails everywhere. Anyone interested in rolling their own should check out Movable Ink (http://movableink.com http://movableink.com) -- dynamic content for email.

dshipper 15y ago
Thanks for the feedback. Yep Moveable Ink has similar technology and they're a great startup. Our product is just a bit more targeted to marketing :)

matdwyer 15y ago

I use standard images (three of them) linked to my Facebook, Testimonials, and Twitter - they do end up getting a lot of hits so I see the benefit in something like this. Not sure if I would go through the hassles of tracking email opens for my conversations with people though. I also find that when the emails are coming back it is quite annoying to have all the image placeholders in the conversations.

dshipper 15y ago
Good point. We tried doing something where if the same email thread was loading multiple banners we would only serve one - but good email services like GMail load an image once and then display it multiple times throughout the thread thus defeating our anti-annoyance measures :)
bks 15y ago
Agreed on having the standard icons in the footer. I do like the idea of being able to update the marketing message so if someone opens an old email - they are current with the brand message. I also include my photograph in every outgoing message - a little corny, but it does help at subsequent networking events.

AznHisoka 15y ago

Who's the target market for this? Most marketing teams want analytics on the actual links in the email body, rather than the signature. And if they had that in place, then tracking the signature is pretty simple addon.

dshipper 15y ago
Any company with employees that send out a lot of email every day. So for example if you have a big sales team, the marketing department doesn't have to tell them "Ok this week we want to talk more about widgetX" instead all they have to do is upload one banner and instantly every email that the sales team sends out has a banner a banner talking about the widgetX". It's also great for charities, schools and political campaigns to raise money.
- AznHisoka 15y ago
  I don't think that would be as effective as a single email devoting to marketing it, so the value of your product wouldn't be as high. For charities, yes I see the value, although I'm not sure if that is a huge revenue source.
  - mediaman 15y ago
    As someone with a decent annual investment in salespeople and customer service staffers, this product looks incredibly valuable, and one of our marketing members is looking into becoming a subscriber because it solves an important hassle point for her. Broad 'newsletter' emails don't get read as much, because they're not going to contain specific relevant information to customers' existing orders or other information they need. In contrast, a service like this allows a little promotional banner to be shown to customers who are almost certainly going to be reading the email, because they are placing an order, checking up on an order, or inquiring about a product. And below the email from the salesperson/CSR, you can promote a relevant product or message that is highly likely to get read. The traditional way has been to badger salespeople until they change their signature, which doesn't work very well. Now, it's all automatic. To the founders: there are a lot of people on here who seem not to understand your product. That's OK, I don't think they're in your target market and don't appear to have the painpoint you're solving. In most of traditional corporate America, this is a big pain point you're solving, especially for the poor marketing people who are tired of trying to get those signatures updated.

a3_nm 15y ago

How does this work? I thought that most email clients these days tried to avoid tracking by refusing to display external images by default. Am I missing something?

dshipper 15y ago
It's just an image in the bottom of the email. Many clients do avoid tracking but many don't. For example on an iPhone all images are loaded by default. Additionally a lot of people press "Display Images Below". Initially I thought that images being blocked would be the biggest hurdle to this project, but it was being used prelaunch by 20 customers and we served over 110,000 impressions during that time (an impression isn't recorded if the image is blocked).
- mbesto 15y ago
  Not to discredit you, but this doesn't sounds very compelling: "Many clients do avoid tracking but many don't." Any percentage number to back up that claim? 110,000 impressions out of how many? Also what's the conversion? Would be interesting to see more research into this (and articulated on the website). Other than, looks coo1! Good luck!
  - dshipper 15y ago
    Thanks for the feedback! It's impossible for us to tell what percentage of the total number of emails sent the 110,000 impressions represents because our server only gets hit when images are loaded. If images aren't loaded our server is never hit, and it's as if the email was never sent. The total CTR across all 110,000 impressions was 0.42%, however we log an impression both when an email is being composed and when it is read on the other end. So if we discount the false positives for composing impressions then the CTR jumps to around 0.91% which is incredibly high given that the banners are not at all optimized. We're working on better analytics to be able to separate legitimate impressions from composing impressions, but don't quite have that functionality yet. Thanks again for commenting I really appreciate it!

spung 15y ago

Great idea, and I love your guys' design! Did you guys design it yourselves or use a toolkit?

dshipper 15y ago
Thanks so much! It's mostly done by hand but the buttons are from Foundation: http://foundation.zurb.com/ http://foundation.zurb.com/

eiji 15y ago

A real "About Us" section would be nice. No marketing unit is going to do business with two twitter accounts. And IMHO don't use twitter accounts with your position on SOPA. 95% of your customers don't care or don't (want to) know.

dshipper 15y ago
Great points all. About Us section is coming ASAP. Agree on the SOPA banners as well. Thanks for taking the time to let us know.

prawn 15y ago

Viewing the site on a landscape iPad, all you see is the first screenshot and a pricing button. There's no visible scrollbar or hint at more content further down the page. At first, I thought it was a bit strange that you would throw people straight to your pricing info without further explanation - only realised there was more on the front door when I came back to it a second time. Might be worth tweaking the sizing so in this format you get a small hint that the content continues?

dshipper 15y ago
Thanks for the heads up we'll check it out!

jnorthrop 15y ago

It looks like a nice service but you really need a privacy policy. What data are you storing, what are you going to do with that data and what can I do to opt-in or out? I can't imagine many organizations getting clearance to use this without that.

dshipper 15y ago
Excellent point. Added to our todo list :)