Stripo: Annual Report

This year is coming to its end — we are looking back on our ups and downs.

It was rich in various events. Luckily, most of them were positive, others taught us what to and what not to do.

Some of them are worth mentioning here:

1. Growth and interesting facts about users in numbers

Stripo is a very young product. This year we’ve grown up from 2.7K to 32K users with 1.1K active payers.

What we are proud of is that 56% of the registrants keep using our tool.

We are also happy to say that 20% of the Stripo users are Agencies.

Trick from Stripo: just a month ago, we added the ability to get registered with us by using the Facebook and Twitter accounts. The former alone drove 5.2K registrations. Implement this registration form, too.

This summer, we released Plugin, a solution for the SaaS services where email communication with clients is the core activity; it’s been installed 312 times.

When we just started, the ratio of English- and Russian-speaking users was 50/50%. Now, 74% of our users are English-speaking, 16% are Russian-speaking users, and others speak Ukrainian, Spanish, French, Italian, German, Portuguese, Indian, etc.

We are becoming an international product. This fact made us think of being a multi-language tool. And our new web site’s interface will be translated into 7 languages.

As long as our builder now speaks 4 languages — English, German, Ukrainian and Russian, you may think we know French and Dutch, as well. Some users speak these languages when reaching out to us via email or Intercom ?
Thanks to Google Translator, we can assist them, too ?

2. Features released in 2018

Among a wide variety of the features we released this year, we want to highlight the following ones:

• Rich ESP integration

In 2017, we had integration with Mailchimp, eSputnik, GetResponse, and Gmail.
In February 2018, we asked you to answer only one question, “What ESP would you like us to add?”.
You spoke — we listened.

This year, we have added direct export to the following marketing automation systems:

1. Salesforce
2. Hubspot;
3. SendGrid;
4. Campaign Monitor;
5. SendPulse;
6. Constant Contact;
7. Braze;
8. Mailigen;
9. Unisender.

Still, 64% of our users export emails as HTML archive and HTML files.
We are really curious who you are and why you keep doing this ?
We’ll appreciate it if you let us know. And if we should integrate with more ESPs, just let us know.

Quick question: every month, 1,000 emails finished is not exported. Guys, what do you do with those emails? You cannot just copy and paste the code, because the chances are the layout is broken. The emails you copy this way do not have the CSS code;

• Direct export to Outlook (as OFT files)

On May 21, we released this option.

No one expected it to be commonly used, yet 5.74% of all emails are exported to this particular email client;

• PDF

Per some users' request, we added this option. Now, almost 7% use it.

We can think of the two ways of using it:

1. downloading and then printing it for further approval;
2. attaching these files to reports.

If there are any other ways we still don’t know of, would you be so kind as to let us know, please? ?

• Custom fonts

We enable our users to add custom fonts. They are applicable to menus, contact information and any other texts in emails, except banners. Because for banners, we already offer 42 special fonts;

• Merge tags

Merge tags are the first step to personalization. As we know, mentioning customer’s name in email increases CTOR by 40%;

• Countdown timers

We find this option crucial for promo and seasonal campaigns as they are meant to urge the customers and let them know how soon the coupon will expire. We’ve released it on September 28th, so far it has been used in various emails for like 2,200 times;

• Image rollover effects

Starting from August 12, we provide our users with the “Image rollover effect” basic block. It is essential for promo campaigns to save precious room in emails, it helps make unique teasers, etc. It’s worth noting that the image rollover effect you create with Stripo, is web safe — works in all email clients, except some versions of Outlook;

• History of changes

When you’re not the only one who has access to emails in a project account, it’s important to know when and by whom the last changes were made.

3. Our content growth

• Email templates

This year we created 180 email templates and added them to the library. Now it has 300 ready-to-use email templates. They are divided into various categories, like seasons, industries, types;

• Blog

In 2018, we enriched our blog with 69 new posts. We hope you find them useful and informative;

• Youtube channel

We added 31 new video tutorials to our Youtube channel. Subscribe to us, leave comments;

• We featured in

2018 was rich in various events. We featured in numerous American, and European reviews. We were compared not only to other emails builders but to the ESPs too, as they are our competitors too for their built-in editors.

Some educational centers in Russia and the Netherlands use our tool in their educational programs.

Note for educational centers: if you want to use our tool in your courses, reach out to us via email to discuss the details — and we will provide you with a free business account.

Also, we contributed blog posts to 19 companies like ContactMonkey, EmailMonks, TemplateMonster, and many others.

4. Events we attended this year

We were quite active this year. Attended:

• Email Innovations Summit 2018, Las Vegas, USA

We listened to reports on HTML typography in emails by Paul Airy (Beyond the Envelope), personalization in emails by Genevieve Longtin (Sharecare, Inc.), a few speakers reported on interactivity in emails. I even made to interview John Thies, Co-founder of Email on Acid, he explained to us why email accessibility is critical for campaign’s success;

• Web Summit 2018 in Lisbon, Portugal

Here, we were honored to get personal acquaintance of Adrian Cockcroft, Vice President at Amazon Web Services, Young Sohn, Chief Strategy Officer at Samsung, Lisa Jackson, Apple’s Vice President, Toni Blair, former PM of the UK and many others;

• ProductHunt

October 2018, we joined the ProductHunt platform where got more than 638 upvotes. I want to thank you for your help and support.

• The Fifth Annual EmailConference, Kiev, Ukraine

Our Product Designer Roman Burdyga introduced Stripo.email to the Ukrainian Market;

• Litmus Live, Boston, Massachusetts, USA

We received a lot of useful information on trends in emails marketing, on hyper-personalization and A/B testing. Here, we met Chad S White, Research Director at Litmus;

• Digital Summit, Chicago, USA

Here we listened to many reports on digital marketing. Were astonished to find out that about 25% of all reports were on email marketing compared to 10% in 2017. This means email marketing is only growing.

All the speakers mentioned email automation and insist on segmenting push notifications;

• StartupGrind, Dnepr, Ukraine

We made it to attend and participate as speakers in the End-year-party held by Startup Grind in Ukraine.

5. How we fix bugs, or our customer support

I want to emphasize that the quality of the Stripo builder is our #1 priority. We run numerous tests and auto-tests to make sure everything works fine — 320 tests in 2018.

Every time, when launching a new feature or fixing some bugs (760 this year), in other words, once some changes have been made to the code, we run an automatic test of the system. Half of these tests are made by our developers manually as a part of the technical maintenance.

When only launching our product, we decided not to have our customer support service. I was the only one who answered all calls, who assisted our users via email and Facebook.

As long as we an international product, I would receive phone calls even at 2 AM. My family got used to late night phone talks ?

Today, there are 7 of us, and this is not the final number of customer service department employees. You can get our qualified help via Intercom, Facebook, Email.

Still, I sometimes get late night calls ?

Our NPS (net promotional score) is 9.0. We are proud of it.
Thank you for estimating us so high and for your trust in us.

Final words

We enjoyed this year because we spent it with you. We do our best to facilitate the email creation process for you.

And if you have any suggestions on ways to make our tool even better, please feel free to contact us via email or Facebook.

Sincerely, Dmitry.