We Created SaaS Email Marketing Solution that Paid off from the Start. Why Our Customers are Not Afraid of the High Check: The Story of Folderly

In the spring of 2019, Belkins faced an unex­pect­ed issue: recip­i­ents stopped respond­ing to their emails. Belkins per­forms B2B lead gen­er­a­tion. It search­es for poten­tial cus­tomers for dif­fer­ent busi­ness­es and attracts them with the help of email mar­ket­ing. One of the company’s pri­ma­ry met­rics is the open rate – the per­cent­age of emails being opened. At that moment, it dropped sharply from 80% to 10%.

One of the Belkins founders, Vla­dyslav Podoliako, start­ed fig­ur­ing out the rea­sons. It turned out that Google released an update and tight­ened the require­ments for mail set­tings. Vla­dyslav plunged into this top­ic and got to the bot­tom in a cou­ple of days. The solu­tion formed the con­cept of Fold­er­ly – a ser­vice that auto­mat­i­cal­ly detects and cor­rects errors in mail­ing set­tings, help­ing you deliv­er mes­sages direct­ly to recip­i­ents’ inbox­es.

Fold­er­ly is only a year and a half old, but more than 150 com­pa­nies are already using it. Thanks to the ser­vice, 60–80% of their recip­i­ents open their let­ters. In this affil­i­ate arti­cle cre­at­ed with Fold­er­ly, its founder Vla­dyslav Podoliako told how they man­aged to devel­op the prod­uct that paid off at the start and what needs to be tak­en into account so that let­ters reach recip­i­ents.

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How Google’s update collapsed business KPIs

«There are three main com­po­nents of email mar­ket­ing: con­tent, cor­rect data­base, and email infra­struc­ture», – lists Vla­dyslav Podoliako. Every­thing was great with the first and sec­ond in Belkins. Let­ters were opened by 60–80% of recip­i­ents, 10–30% of open emails were answered, and 13–15% of respons­es were con­vert­ed into busi­ness meet­ings.

Belkins sharp­ened process­es to increase these index­es but did not both­er with tech­ni­cal set­tings because there was no need. «When the Google update came out, all indi­ca­tors dropped. It was a lucky chance when some­one respond­ed to our mes­sages. It was crit­i­cal for the busi­ness», – recalls the Belkins co-founder.

Vla­dyslav delved into tech­ni­cal details. «I need­ed to under­stand what hap­pened to a let­ter on the way from sender to recip­i­ent, – he says. – It turned out that a lot depends on how you set up the domain, what pro­to­cols you pre­scribed, what DNS recordsdomain name sys­tem – a sys­tem that stores infor­ma­tion about domain names you did».

For exam­ple, you make an email newslet­ter through the Send­Pulse, Mailchimp, or Send­grid email ser­vice. The name of the ser­vice must be spec­i­fied in the SPFsender pol­i­cy frame­work DNS record – the email authen­ti­ca­tion method designed to detect spoofed address­es. The mail ser­vice of the recip­i­ent exam­ines which tool was used when send­ing the let­ter and which one is spec­i­fied in the SPF. If they match, there’s a less­er chance it is spam, and the let­ter will like­ly end up in the Inbox.

There are dozens of such nuances. As Vla­dyslav says, it becomes more and more dif­fi­cult every year to send emails.

«We start selling when there is no product yet»

In a cou­ple of days, Vla­dyslav fig­ured out all the details and solved the prob­lem of Belkins: the recip­i­ents start­ed open­ing let­ters again and respond­ing to them. After that, he start­ed build­ing the email-deliv­er­abil­i­ty depart­ment at Belkins, whose tar­get was main­tain­ing the abil­i­ty to deliv­er emails suc­cess­ful­ly. The team man­u­al­ly set up mail­box­es for Belkins cus­tomers and those who paid for the ser­vice sep­a­rate­ly.

The idea of trans­form­ing this exper­tise into a prod­uct was on the sur­face. Fold­er­ly has gone through typ­i­cal prod­uct stages: a sim­ple back-end solu­tion, a failed pro­to­type, and an auto­mat­ed ser­vice that is set up in a few clicks. But, unlike most star­tups that grow through invest­ments, Fold­er­ly paid itself from the first days.

«We always strive for the project to pay off imme­di­ate­ly: we start sell­ing when there is no prod­uct yet, – says Vla­dyslav. – Every­one involved in email mar­ket­ing faces the prob­lem of email deliv­er­abil­i­ty. Fold­er­ly solves it, so it became imme­di­ate­ly in demand».

Fold­er­ly seems to have com­peti­tors, but in real­i­ty, it doesn’t. Valid­i­ty is the most famous, with a 40-year his­to­ry and a check of up to $20,000 per month. The irony is that Valid­i­ty doesn’t bring results. It exam­ines mail­ings and gives infor­ma­tion about errors. But nei­ther does it explain the rea­sons nor solve the prob­lem. And accord­ing to Vla­dyslav, small-sized com­peti­tors with an $8 month­ly check per mail­box use out­dat­ed tech­nol­o­gy and are there­fore use­less.

Now Fold­er­ly is used by more than 150 com­pa­nies, pri­mar­i­ly Amer­i­can. The ser­vice team includes more than 30 peo­ple and con­tin­ues to grow.

How Folderly works

Fold­er­ly is a sub­scrip­tion-based cloud plat­form. It doesn’t send let­ters – this is an add-on for email automa­tion ser­vices. Fold­er­ly detects and fix­es errors in mail set­tings and ensures that the sent let­ters not just reach a recip­i­ent but get into their Inbox.

Fold­er­ly already inte­grates with 20 pop­u­lar mail ser­vices. Lat­er, there will be 150 of them. For exam­ple, to con­nect your Send­Pulse account to Fold­er­ly, you need to reg­is­ter on the site, add your email address and fill in just two fields: your Send­Pulse account ID and its Secret API. Fold­er­ly has a video tuto­r­i­al on how to find this data. An email mar­ket­ing spe­cial­ist sends out mail­ings through Send­Pulse as usu­al, and then the mag­ic hap­pens: the email deliv­er­abil­i­ty rate starts grow­ing.

«A man­ag­er sent 59 emails. 44 of these end­ed up in the Inbox, and 15, for some rea­son, did not reach a client, – Vla­dyslav explains. – Fold­er­ly did some­thing on the back­end, like manip­u­lat­ing the domain and records, and all unde­liv­ered emails hit inbox­es the next day».

Anoth­er help­ful fea­ture of Fold­er­ly is con­tent analy­sis. The ser­vice checks the let­ter for spam words and high­lights them with col­ors: yel­low, green, and red. Red means the word should not be used. This is how the sys­tem marks words and phras­es like «free», «sale», and «click here».

The ser­vice team aspires to prove that email mar­ket­ing is still an effec­tive tool; you just need to know how to use it. There­fore, the com­pa­ny has a cus­tomer suc­cess depart­ment. These man­agers advise clients on issues relat­ed to Folderly’s per­for­mance and email mar­ket­ing in gen­er­al.

View vacan­cies at Fold­er­ly here.

 

Why the mail deliverability issue is cyclical

All Fold­er­ly cus­tomers have a shared pain: recip­i­ents open about 10% of their emails. The rest do not reach the inbox fold­er or end up in spam.

«A client says: “I bought a domain for $10,000, and at the begin­ning, every­thing was fine, but then things got worse.” We ask how they set up the domain, and it turns out that they didn’t do it at all», – describes Vla­dyslav.

In rare cas­es, clients do cor­rect con­fig­u­ra­tions. There were about three of these among Folderly’s part­ners. But even deep knowl­edge of tech­ni­cal pecu­liar­i­ties doesn’t pre­vent all prob­lems.

Whether your emails reach recip­i­ents and which fold­er they get to depends on the domain health, which is influ­enced by dozens of fac­tors. For exam­ple, you sent 100 emails, and 20 peo­ple report­ed them as spam. Each com­plaint decreas­es the domain’s health – the fol­low­ing email sequence will result in a 30–40% of spam rate.

Or, for instance, there are non-exis­tent address­es on the mail­ing list: peo­ple have changed their jobs or delet­ed mail­box­es. Send­ing to such address­es also harms domain health, which makes the prob­lem cycli­cal. Fold­er­ly mon­i­tors domain health con­stant­ly and gets emails back to the inbox after each dete­ri­o­ra­tion in per­for­mance.

Accord­ing to Vla­dyslav, with Fold­er­ly, email cam­paigns become more effec­tive from the first days, and sig­nif­i­cant improve­ments come in 3–6 months, depend­ing on the type of mail­ing. With cold emails, the open email rates can increase up to 70–80%, and with warm emails – up to 40%.

Fold­er­ly sub­scrip­tion costs $200 per mail­box. But the more emails, the cheap­er: the con­nec­tion of 50 mail­box­es costs $50 each.

«The biggest client, a start­up uni­corn from Ire­land, con­nect­ed 500 mail­box­es, – says Vla­dyslav. – They are will­ing to pay for it because if the domain gets spammed, they will get 500 peo­ple who are not per­form­ing lead gen­er­a­tion tasks».  

The email’s path to Inbox

Gen­er­al­ly, the email deliv­er­abil­i­ty prob­lem is asso­ci­at­ed with out­dat­ed tech­nol­o­gy, says the founder of Fold­er­ly. The first Inter­net focus group invent­ed the pro­to­cols for send­ing and receiv­ing let­ters, SMTP and IMAP, back in 1986. «The pro­to­cols cre­ators thought that emails would be sent in tens, at most hun­dreds of thou­sands, – explains Vla­dyslav. –And today, 3 bil­lion emails are sent dai­ly, 60% of them are scams». 

It turns out that the sys­tem is chok­ing. Fur­ther­more, the path of let­ters to the Inbox fold­er is pret­ty tor­tu­ous.

First stage. When a per­son clicks “Send,” a dig­i­tal sig­na­ture DKIM is attached to a let­terthe email authen­ti­ca­tion method that stands for “domain keys iden­ti­fied mail”. A record of this sig­na­ture must first be made in the domain’s DNS. Before receiv­ing an email, the sys­tem gets a dig­i­tal sig­na­ture and ver­i­fies it with the one reg­is­tered in the sender’s domain. If the sig­na­tures match, it con­cludes that there is no decep­tion, and the let­ter can pass.

The sec­ond stage – is the DMARCdomain mes­sage authen­ti­ca­tion pol­i­cy rec­on­cil­i­a­tion. The sys­tem checks what is indi­cat­ed in the domain in case some­thing is wrong with it or an out­com­ing let­ter. There are three stan­dard poli­cies: reject – then the sender will receive an error send­ing the let­ter; quar­an­tine – the sys­tem will skip 50% of emails; none – in this case, noth­ing will hap­pen.

In the third stage, the let­ter should pass through the spam fil­ter. It checks the IP address, domain, the letter’s con­tent, and whether the domain is black­list­ed. If all the con­fig­u­ra­tions are set cor­rect­ly and the spam fil­ters don’t find any fault, the let­ter goes to the Inbox.

View vacan­cies at Fold­er­ly here.

 

Folderly improves Ukrainian product development culture

Fold­er­ly inte­grates direct­ly with Gmail, Yahoo, Out­look, and oth­er email ser­vice providers through the API. Oth­er ser­vices run on out­dat­ed SMTP and IMAP pro­to­cols. They do not affect the sys­tem cor­rect­ly and there­fore do not bring results.

«All ESPs are lega­cy code. Work­ing with it cost­ed us and every­one who dealt with lega­cy code a lot of pain and suf­fer­ing. But we did it, and there­fore our ser­vice is effec­tive», – says Vla­dyslav.

Folderly’s fron­tend is based on Vue 3, back­end – on Nest.js, and every­thing is writ­ten in Type­script. Inte­gra­tion tests cov­er the entire ser­vice code, and e2e tests cov­er the main func­tion­al­i­ty.

The team is focused on cre­at­ing an awe­some glob­al tech­no­log­i­cal prod­uct. Accord­ing to Vla­dyslav, Ukraine has only a few such cas­es because the mar­ket was formed through out­sourc­ing.

«Using Fold­er­ly as an exam­ple, we are pro­mot­ing a prod­uct devel­op­ment cul­ture in Ukraine, – says the service’s founder. – We want to teach more peo­ple how to cre­ate prod­ucts for cus­tomers and them­selves». 

The team hand­picks brainy spe­cial­ists who clear­ly under­stand the rea­sons and pur­pos­es of the tasks they per­form. Now they are look­ing for prod­uct man­agers, design­ers, and mid­dle & senior JS devel­op­ers.

Find more infor­ma­tion about vacan­cies here.

Striving to make the world a little bit better

The com­mon trait of the entire team is the desire to make the world a lit­tle bet­ter. The guys try to make life eas­i­er for users and cre­ate inno­va­tions. They also don’t stand aside if they can ben­e­fit the coun­try. When the war broke out, Fold­er­ly did what they do best: they found the con­tacts of world politi­cians and jour­nal­ists and bom­bard­ed them with emails about the sit­u­a­tion in Ukraine. In addi­tion, the team par­tic­i­pat­ed in hack­ing and block­ing Russ­ian resources and launched the «Stop­WarUkraine» web­site in one day, sup­port­ing the Armed Forces of Ukraine and human­i­tar­i­an projects the whole time.

In Fold­er­ly, we make plans for a year and a half ahead. With the help of a team of like-mind­ed peo­ple, Vla­dyslav Podoliako wants to shape the ser­vice into a glob­al cyber­se­cu­ri­ty solu­tion and «push back big slug­gish com­pa­nies that only draw beau­ti­ful graphs for a for­tune».

job oppor­tu­ni­ties at Fold­er­ly