Some marketers believe that to make more money, you have to send more emails, which Matt Harris, founder and CEO of Dyspatch, refers to as the “law of email.”
“All of those emails are leading to a decline in open engagement rates,” he told TechCrunch. “In addition, there is a new generation entering the workforce that isn’t email centric, and is having to learn how to email.”
Most marketers don’t take courses on email marketing, rather it’s a skill learned on-the-job, Harris added. As time goes on, people get to a point where they create their own designs and copy and paste lines of code into whatever email system they are using.
With the advent of multiple tools and resources for sending out email, it has become a challenge as people have to learn how to use different ones and the code they relied on doesn’t always work.
Harris started off with a solution called Sendwithus in 2018 that was a developer product in the email space. Later on, he and his team identified email production as a big problem and pivoted to become Dyspatch to bring a more drag-and-drop approach to designing emails. The company’s email production tool essentially takes the tips and tricks from people designing email well and makes it widely accessible.
Dyspatch is leveraging Google’s AMP for Email to launch its interactive email product, called Apps in Email, last year that makes implementing the AMP email elements simpler for non-technical users.
The tool is now being used by more than 300 customers, including Canva, which uses AMP emails to boost engagement with comment reply notifications.
“Dyspatch has massively reduced the hours our team spends on creating emails, which has allowed us to really scale our content production,” said Megan Walsh, global head of lifecycle marketing at Canva, in a written statement. “We’re producing over 20 emails a week, and the platform ensures every single one is on-brand, localized and responsive, without any engineering effort. It’s also allowed us to implement interactivity with AMP comment reply emails. The Dyspatch team was so supportive and collaborative on that project, and it’s been a huge success with our users.”
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Dyspatch is already able to prove out that brands see a 500% increase in email engagement and 300% increase in email conversions after developing fully functional interactive AMP email campaigns, Harris said.
The company is now at the point where it is scaling its go-to-market and technology teams to support new customer growth, and raised $6 million in seed funding to help. Gradient Ventures led the round, with participation from Initialized Capital, Baseline Ventures, Blue Run Ventures, Scott Banister and VanEdge Partners. This is Dypatch’s first round of funding, but together with its previous company, they raised $11 million in total.
Dyspatch also plans to use this round of funding to further integrate with email service providers, like Oracle Eloqua and Salesforce Marketing Cloud, to make sure that users will be able to facilitate a seamless email workflow no matter which resources they use to send email.
The company focuses on how many people are using the app, and its customer base more than doubled in the past year. One of the repeated patterns Harris is seeing are customers coming back each year and adding more users. For example, one of its marquee customers initially bought 10 user seats in the first year of the contract, but within six months grew that by 10 times.
Next up, the company is taking steps to open up its technology to third parties and to build some of the features customers have been asking for, like calendar booking in email.
“Today we are building out the building blocks for apps, surveys and approval apps, but our DNA is an engineering company, so we want to build a marketplace so that third parties can build apps on our marketplace,” Harris added.
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