Our partner New Relic has always strived to make the lives of its customers easier with its SaaS-based Application Performance Management (APM) tool. Now they’ve made a good thing even better with the release of the New Relic Platform – a seamless new way to monitor the performance of any technology through the intuitive and easy-to-use New Relic interface.

With the New Relic Platform, you’ll be able to get in-depth, real time insight into the performance of each component of your application stack – from cloud services, to the database, caching, networking, queuing and more. And best of all, you’ll be able to do it from a single pane of glass to monitor all the metrics you care about.

We’re excited to be part of this new initiative with New Relic. With our plugin on the New Relic platform, our customers have the ability to see all of their data in one place so they can not only monitor their email performance, but also their application performance in one location. Developers can easily access statistical monitoring and a simple ‘at-a-glance’ health check of email traffic. Our plugin includes real-time information on email performance including deliverability, engagement, and compliance factors.

Our partnership with New Relic saves developers time, adds agility to the process, and makes them more productive to build amazing apps. That’s what we’re all about. Smart, fast decisions with your email data.

Sign up now for your free New Relic Standard account. You’ll quickly get insight into all the metrics you care about and wonder how you ever got by without it.  And it’s easy to access your SendGrid email statistics on the New Relic dashboard.  To get started, all you need is a New Relic account and a SendGrid account and to follow these steps:

1. From the New Relic SendGrid Plugin Dashboard you will be provided a product activation key. Copy this and click the link “continue”.

2. You will be redirected to the App settings within SendGrid and will need to log in if you are not already authenticated to the SendGrid site.

3. Provide your New Relic license key.

4.  Enable the app.

5. In less than five minutes your stats should be sent to the New Relic API. SendGrid sends stats to New Relic every 5 minutes for users with the app enabled. Go to the New Relic site and there you will find the SendGrid extension on the left menu.

6. After clicking on ‘SendGrid’ extension, a SendGrid instance will be displayed. Click on it.

7. And there you will see the statistics in three categories: Deliveries, Engagement, and Compliance.

Also on the right side you can see metrics in percentages.

SendGrid provides two methods of sending email: the Web API and SMTP API. SendGrid recommends using the SMTP API for sending emails. For an explanation of the benefits of each, refer to our integration page.

Now that you’ve seen how easy it is to use the SendGrid email service, follow these links to learn more:

• SendGrid PHP Code Example

• Examples of Other Programming Languages with SendGrid

• SendGrid API Documentation

“When looking for an email solution for our growing business, we compared SendGrid against all of the well-known email providers, and in the end found that SendGrid was the optimal solution for a high-growth start-up like ours. We have found SendGrid to be easy, scalable, cost-effective, and flexible.” —

With the release of our Marketing Email Service this week, we’re happy to share a success story from one of our valued customers, Buffalo Studios. Buffalo Studios is a social gaming company whose goal is to provide social networks with games that help friends build relationships through interactive entertainment.

When Buffalo Studios realized that their growth necessitated that they move from their in-house email infrastructure to a cloud-based email solution, they turned to SendGrid to help them seamlessly and cost-effectively scale their program.

Like all busy marketers, Buffalo Studios needed to ensure that their marketing email service was reliable and low maintenance, so they could focus on continuing to grow their product instead of on manual upkeep. Real-time metrics were also a necessity, so they could track the effectiveness of their campaigns and adjust as needed.

With SendGrid’s Marketing Email Service, Buffalo Studios has grown from sending approximately 100,000 marketing emails a month to sending over 20 million a month. With SendGrid’s intuitive UI, setting up and deploying their campaigns is no longer a huge time commitment and customizing their emails, managing subscriber lists, and checking analytics now only takes a few clicks.

Read Buffalo Studios’ entire case study here to learn more about how they leveraged SendGrid’s easy-to-use web interface, powerful analytics, trademark deliverability expertise, and more to power their marketing email.

For more on SendGrid’s Marketing Email Service visit our Pricing Page.

Our Marketing Email Service features include but are not limited to:

An easy-to-use web interface with:

• Pre-designed email templates
• Drag and drop editor
• Ability to use your own HTML
• Scheduled email campaign delivery
• A summary view for all your campaigns to help you monitor your overall campaign effectiveness and recipient list growth

Affordable and flexible pricing options:

• Pricing is based on monthly email volume, not the size of your subscription list.
• We work with you to understand your anticipated monthly volume in order to match you with the appropriate volume-based monthly pricing plan.

Powerful analytics that allow you to monitor your marketing campaign success:

• Track email sends, deliveries, bounces, spam reports, clicks, opens, unsubscribes, category use, and more in real-time.
• Create customized reports based on timeframe, email category, ISP, geography, and device-type.
• Apply A/B testing to automatically send out your best performing email.
• Download data for greater flexibility and customization.

Simple list management:

• Email list creation via list uploads, manual creation, or pointing to an external URL.
• Category creation to help you segment and analyze your subscriber lists.
• A powerful subscription widget that enables visitors to subscribe to email from an app or website.

Like our Transactional Email Service, our Marketing Email Service is backed by SendGrid’s trademark deliverability expertise. You’ll be amazed by how easy the campaigns are to set up and how affordable it is to send high volumes of email. And if you ever need help, you can take advantage of our extensive documentation resources and our twenty-four seven support team.

We’re very excited to announce this new feature and to continue to provide world-class and scalable email delivery to our customers. To learn more, visit our Pricing Page and check out our VidGrid video tutorials for more step-by-step walkthroughs of the service.

SendGrid doesn’t compromise when it comes to compromised accounts and neither should you. There are a number of ways you, your computer or your servers could be vulnerable. Our 11 step security checklist can help identify issues and hopefully recognize a problem before it causes a negative impact. Every day that you put off security steps, your reputation as a business and a sender is at risk. Take a few minutes, go through this checklist and make sure that your systems are secure.

• Make your password robust. Use a mix of upper- and lower-case letters, numbers, special characters (ie, @, #, $) and avoid guessable words or phrases.
• Avoid auto-saving your password in a web browser. Anyone with access to the machine you use would be able to login wherever you use a saved password.
• Perform regular virus scans on any computers that are used to send mail through SendGrid or login to your account. If a machine is compromised, malware could grab your credentials or log your keystrokes.
• Secure and encrypt your wireless connections. Similarly, be wary of public networks–only join those from a known source that require a password.
• Enable a firewall on your machine. A firewall closes unused ports by default and ensures only expected connections come into your computer.
• Lock down anything listing credentials. If you have configuration files or web pages (Facebook, Twitter, Linkdin, etc.) that contain your SendGrid credentials, make sure they are not indexable via a search engine or visible in any way to outsiders.
• Keep applications up-to-date. Older versions of WordPress and other software may be vulnerable to exploitation. Secure WordPress by upgrading.
• Perform a script audit. Are there any rogue web scripts or forms on your server? Find out the origin of every script and how it’s used–or remove it from the server.
• Prevent mass emails from scripts. If you have a website sending emails through SendGrid, are there checks in place to prevent visitors (or bots) from sending email in large volumes or in any way that is abusive? For example, secure your registration form.
• Check mail server settings. If you have a mail server which routes outbound mail through SendGrid ensure it is not configured as an open relay.
• Use a service like Stop The Hacker to give your website a vulnerability assessment, check for web malware and offer guidance for better security.

Following these steps will strengthen your defenses against potential threats. By avoiding vulnerabilities, you keep your email reputation in your control.

Checklist image by TEDx Manipal University Dubai.

LIST MANAGEMENT

What is the best way to get an old list (that you created over many years) cleaned?

We recommend starting to send to your most recent signups first and then tier back by sign up date. For example, for the first week, send to people who signed up in the past month, then the next week, send to people who signed up in the past 3 months, then the last 6 months and so on. With each send, watch your delivery, inboxing, and engagement metrics and once you start to see a drop off, stop sending to those email addresses.

You can also try a one-time re-engagement campaign. Anyone who doesn’t engage (meaning click or open) can be removed from your list.

Are social marketing channels a better way to gain followers than through purchased lists?

You should always avoid using purchased lists because there’s no way to test the quality of the subscribers on that list. It’s best to acquire subscribers as organically as possible. If you do gain subscribers from a social network, just be aware that these networks don’t actively update their email addresses, so some of the addresses can be old or expired (like .edu addresses). So be sure to use a verification process, like a confirmation email or double opt-in to ensure that you’re only gaining active addresses.

What’s the best way to build your own email list?

Again organic methods of building your list is best—create quality content that potential subscribers will want to read, take advantage of cross promotional opportunities with your partners, extend special offers, and be sure to make your opt-in form easy and accessible.

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IPS

If I’m using SendGrid for my sending, how do I create/see a second IP for marketing emails vs. transactional emails?

This is very easy to set up, by creating a second sub-user account and requesting an additional IP.

Is your reputation tied solely to an IP address or is it tied to your domain name as well?  Also, let’s say you get a bad IP reputation because you’re on a shared mail server, can you move to your own IP and build a good reputation, or is a bad reputation going to follow you?

For the most part, your reputation is tied to your IP. If you move from a shared IP to a new IP, your reputation won’t follow you.

What’s a good approach to warming up your IP? Daily or month to month?

You can increase your volume daily—just do it slowly. There is no exact science to warming up—you just need to watch your open rates to make sure that you’re not being throttled. Warming up your IP not only helps introduce you to the ISPs, but it also helps you fix any issues that may arise in your sending behavior and content before you send to your entire user base.

Does SendGrid pre-warm IPs?

No, we do not pre-warm IPs. Each user is responsible for creating their reputation on their IPs.

If I’m a SendGrid user, am I on a dedicated IP?

SendGrid users on our Silver Plan and above are on a dedicated IP. If you’re not sure what plan you’re on, contact our support team.

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ISPS

My emails are currently getting into Gmail and AOL, but not into Yahoo! and Microsoft—what can we do?

Requirements at the ISPs are all different. For an insider perspective on how to stay in the good graces of the ISPs, check out our webinar: Google, Yahoo! , and Hotmail, Oh My! Navigating the ISP Landscape.

How do you stop your email from being throttled?

Throttling can be tricky! It’s an indication that you’re getting push back from the ISPs on the mail you’re sending. In order to stop the throttling, you need to first identify the issue.  Check your metrics to see if you have high spam and complaint rates or if you have low engagement.  If you get throttled, use it a learning opportunity and get back on the right track. If you have low engagement, make adjustments to your content and consider segmenting your email by demographic, geography, and past behavior. Also unsubscribe users who aren’t opening your mail.

For more information, check out our blog post on email throttling.

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ENGAGEMENT AND REPUTATION

What engagement metrics should I monitor? Open rates? CTRs?

When we talk about engagement metrics, we mean opens and clicks. These are the first steps that a user takes when your email gets to the inbox. These behaviors show whether your recipient is interested in your content or not.

Do unsubscribes hurt your reputation?

High unsubscribe rates don’t affect your reputation. In the long run, it’s better that subscibers who are not interested in your content are off your list anyway.

What % of opens and clicks equals highly engaged? Is open tracking inaccurate?

It’s hard to give an exact percentage for opens and clicks because it’s generally really industry dependent. There are just so many variables at play. However, a rule of thumb is around 15% for opens and 8% for clicks. But again, this can vary depending on industry.

In order for an email to be tracked as an open, images have to be enabled. This means that there is always a small percentage that won’t get tracked, so under reporting on opens is common.

How can you know your IP reputation?

You can utilize Sender Score which is a free service. Just plug in your IP and it will show you your score. Using Sender Score gives you a great health check on your IP.

How do you find out about domain reputation?

Finding out your domain reputation is harder than IP reputation. We recommend checking out Invaluement.com—it will let you track your domain to see if it’s been placed on a blacklist.

If your reputation has dropped should you change your IP or domain?

Don’t do either—if you change your IP or domain, your behavior will follow you. Your sending practices are the issue. Find out what you’re doing wrong and fix your mistakes. If you have good sending behaviors, you won’t have to worry about changing your IP or domain.

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MISC

What are Spam traps?

For more information on spam traps, check out this blog post. And for more advice on how to stay out of the spam folder, read our free guide and watch our Top Tips video.  

Do you have any guides on newsletter writing?

We have a bunch of resources about content and design tips here on our blog—we also just published a free guide: Transactional and Marketing Email Guide: How to Build a Powerful Integrated Email Program that shares best practices for writing effective content and relevant examples.

For more insights into how to avoid the 7 Deadly Email Sins that will drag you into the email underworld, reference our free guide here and listen to a free recording of the webcast.

A webhook lets a developer provide a URL to which an API will send data. For example, Twilio uses a webhook to send inbound SMS details so an application can react to the text message in some way. Our own SendGrid Parse API similarly sends the pieces of an email (including attachments) for use in customer service tools, intelligent responders or many fun applications. SMS and email are examples well-positioned for real-time use cases. Outside of communications, webhooks are also useful.

Just browse the IFTTT recipes or Zapier Zaps. Both services allow anyone to connect APIs together based on something happening. If you’re tagged in a Facebook photo, for example, perhaps you want to save that photo to Dropbox. For either of these services to perform that action, they first need to check Facebook for new tagged photos. If you don’t get tagged very often, they end up polling the Facebook API many times as they wait for that rare tag. A webhook from Facebook could proactively send information about a new tagged photo only when there’s a new tag.

Weather API Metwit recently added webhooks for monitoring precipitation. Applications can let Metwit know the locations where they want to know about precipitation. Should it start raining, snowing, or otherwise precipitating at a location you request, you’ll get the details pushed to your callback URL. Weather data is popular with developers, but usually you need to ask to receive the conditions or forecast. Metwit sends them to you.

Wherever data is added or updated in an API is a good opportunity for a webhook. Software-as-a-service applications often have APIs to help customers integrate into business systems. Webhooks make that integration instantaneous. Since integrations may make a customer three times more likely to pay for a product, it makes sense to grease the wheels to get apps the data they need.

SendGrid has a couple different webhooks. The Parse API was mentioned above, but perhaps the more powerful webhook is the Event API. Your application can receive information about bounces, clicks, unsubscribes and a bunch of other events.

Webhooks aren’t the only way to enable real-time interactions with APIs. There are streaming solutions with persistent connections, PubSubHubBub and XMPP. But most APIs don’t have any alternative to polling for changes. Webhooks are the simplest way to get apps just the information they need when they need it. And more APIs need to provide this ready access to data, because every API and its users could benefit from being more real-time.

Photo by Steven Taschuk

Registration forms are a great way to follow up people’s interest in what you are offering on your website. Unfortunately, registration forms can be a large source of a sender acquiring bounced addresses and spam traps, which could cause your business to spam a host’s mailbox without proper validation of addresses. This can result in a lower SendGrid internal reputation score, as well as reflect poorly upon your business. Fortunately, there are many helpful techniques that can help a sender avoid many of the issue that can come up through their registration form.

Require a Double Entry Email Address

Sometimes in the registration process users make mistakes entering their email addresses, such as person@domain.coom or person@@domain.com. By entering the email address twice and having a system in place that checks that the addresses match up, the person entering their email address has a much smaller chance of accidentally entering an invalid address.

This practice is debated in user experience circles because a common user reaction is to copy and paste the email address.

Captcha-block the Bots

A good technique in protecting your registration form from automated bots is placing a required Captcha in the form. A Captcha is a test to ensure that form is filled out by a human being as opposed to a bot. The image is not replicable by a bot but easily replicated by a human being.

Send a Confirmation Email

One common issue that arises with email registration forms is people using false or fake addresses. To prevent this, you can require a Double Opt-In Email, confirming that their address exists. A double opt-in email not only helps ensure that there is an actual human being registering but also validates that the recipient did indeed sign up for your registration.

There are many great techniques available to protect your registration form but a balance must be created between user friendliness and security. Some forms have many required fields in registering as well as checks to make sure that the form is filled out correctly. Too many fields can drive away potential interest in your site or product. One way to balance out the registration process is to have other information about the person be collected on a landing page after the registration form is done. This serves to be both user friendly, as well as allow you to collect valuable information.

No matter what method you choose to ensure the quality of collected email addresses, the result is that you should only be sending to valid addresses with recipients who expect to receive an email from you.

Even the most well-intentioned email program can be plagued by the pitfalls of the email underworld. Spam traps, blacklists, phishers, and more are all hell-bent on making your email’s journey to the inbox a treacherous one.

Think you know how to keep your email on the right path and avoid temptation? Join SendGrid’s email experts Ali Frusciano and Katie Nelson this Thursday June 13th at 1:00 PM EDT as they take you down the top 7 fastest roads to email hell, and back!

How are they built?

Within the OpenShift platform, you can create applications. These applications consist of something known as gears. According to one of the Red Hat mentors at the event, gears are essentially a user with a home directory. Cartridges are what we install in our gear to allow our applications to work. This is essentially a directory structure that houses all the logic for components that our applications might need. This could be a language cartridge such as Rails or a DB Cartridge such as Mongo or even something else.

The engineers at Red Hat thought it would be cool to build out a simple Sendgrid cartridge, so OpenShift users can just do a quick install of the cartridge and not have to worry about installing our libraries and any dependencies they might need. This was simple to build and the rest of the post will walk through the file structure of the cartridge and details on the files I used.

Below you can see the OpenShift Cartridge file structure. A big portion of this is optional and largely dependent on the type of cartridge you want to build. If you want to see how other parts of this file structure are you used you can check out OpenShift’s httpd cartridge tutorial.

OpenShift Cartridge File structure

When a developer installs your cartridge, OpenShift will copy this directory structure that a developer created from the cartridge library to your gear. However, the usr directory which holds all the logic for that cartridge will be symlinked in, so it can be shared among all the installed cartridge applications.

Cartridge Metadata

While there are a lot of optional components to this structure, I will cover what I and Principal software engineer, Jhon Honce, worked on at the event. Let’s begin with the Metadata and specifically the manifest.yml file first.

The manifest.yml file lets OpenShift know what features your cartridge requires and also uses this file to present data about your cartridge to potential users. I will cover some key elements of this file below.

This field basically acts as a prefix for the variables generated by your cartridge. You can have more than one cartridge installed on your gear and this prefix helps with organization.

This value lets OpenShift keep track of the version of your cartridge. When a new version is published OpenShift will compare there to determine what is necessary to upgrade for the developers application.

This is where we put environment variables our application might need. Since this manifest is for an upcoming Sendgrid cartridge, we have two environment variables that are important to us, which is user auth info.

This is not shown in my example above, but this url contains the web accessible link of your cartridge. You will need this set when deploying your cartridge.

Managed Files

The managed_files.yml is not something we used but it is important to note. This file keeps track of directories and lets us lock certain files. This means that once our cartridge is installed, people will be able to read data from that specified cartridge path but not write to it.

Cartridge Scripts

These files are bash scripts that let the cartridge author install any environments necessary for their cartridges. The script at bin/setup is used to install the dependencies of our libraries.

Deploy

Ultimately, creating an OpenShift cartridge is essentially adding your libraries or executable files in the /usr directory. Then modifying the cartridge metadata for potential users who will install the cartridge. Finally modifying the bash scripts in the bin directory to do whatever process is necessary to make sure the environment in the cartridge is right to run the application in the usr directory.

After that is done you are ready to deploy. Make sure you post your manifest.yml file on a public accessible URL. Then with the aid of the OpenShift command line gem which can be downloaded by typing sudo gem install rhc, run:

With that, you have built and deployed a Red Hat Cartridge for the Open Shift PaaS.

Shared IPs

Have you ever had a virtual mailing address where you could receive mail at a shared location or perhaps you are reading this in your shared office space? This is pretty much how a shared IP works. You are co-locating your mail streams with several other senders. Here are some things to consider with a shared IP.

• No reputation control. With a shared IP, you are at the mercy of your sending cohorts. If they are following email best practices, then you can reap the benefits of an IP address with a high reputation, but if not, there is little you can do to ensure high delivery rates. In either case, it’s important for your SMTP provider to regularly monitor sender activity to ensure that everyone is adhering to the rules of the road and maximizing the opportunity for their customers.
• Low volume sender. If you send less than 100k emails per year, then it might not be worth moving to a dedicated IP especially if your ESP makes it cost prohibitive. ISPs like to see consistent patterns in sending so if you don’t have high activity levels you could end up with no reputation resulting in low email delivery rates.

Dedicated IPs

Very much like your home address, you will be the only domain sending email over a dedicated IP address. The benefits of a shared IP are as follows.

• Full reputation control: By being the only domain sending over an IP, you can control and monitor your sending reputation directly. In this way, you don’t have to worry about being affected by another sender’s activity. Instead, you can focus on building a healthy email program and utilize email delivery tools to optimize your email program.
• High volume sender. If you send over 100k emails per year, it might benefit you to switch to a dedicated IP address. At this point, you will establish a consistent sending pattern and can build a solid reputation. You can also take advantage of other services like whitelisting for improved email deliverability.

Shared vs. Dedicated

Most senders start out on a shared IP and then move to a dedicated IP once their email program grows and matures. Depending on your provider, getting a dedicated IP can be pricey, but SendGrid focuses on affordability by giving you a dedicated IP starting at our Silver package and charging just $20 per month for each dedicated IP thereafter. Even if you send less email than noted above, use consistency as the driver in your decision to go the shared or dedicated route. In the end, you want maximum control. Sharing is great for some things such as likes and pins, but not so much for your reputation.

To learn more about deliverability tips, download our free guide: SendGrid’s Ultimate Email Deliverability Guide.