Parcel 2.0
Today is the day. I'm unbelievably excited to share with you all some pretty amazing updates to what Parcel can do for you and your team. In fact, this is so big we've been calling it Parcel 2.0. These features are things that have come up in conversations time and time again – thank you to all of you who have helped with making Parcel what it is.
Let's jump into it.
SaaS commitment can be scary. Especially when there's no free trial before forking over a credit card! Luckily new Parcel users don't have to have that fear because free trials are here! New signups or users on the current Community tier (free) can take either the Pro or Business tier for a spin with a 7-day free trial starting today.
A pretty exciting update if we do say so ourselves! Already convinced?
Email is a team sport. From ideation to send, the best emails are made by groups of hard-working, passionate people. We've imagined Parcel as the hub of that process. And now, we've taken the first steps in that direction.
Think Google Docs. You bring in your teammates. One person writes the first section, someone else on the second, and another person works on formatting. The gold standard of team collaboration.
Today, we've enabled that same experience in Parcel! Simply open up the same file with as many teammates as you'd like and start collaborating away ✨
Whether you're part of an agency or working on one brand, your emails most likely will need to be reviewed. Stakeholders, managers, clients, and more, you need to get a clear and official sign-off before the send.
With Parcel's Approval and Feedback, you can smoothly move from creation to approvals without switching between tools.
Start the feedback process and send the link to anyone, regardless of if they have a Parcel account. They'll be able to approve with just two clicks. Or, if there are changes to be made, they can request changes and comment.
The feedback page includes all the power of Parcel live previews – mobile and desktop views, dark and light mode, and even accessibility testing. Your team can now leave feedback in the right context.
If you've ever created an outlook email address to test how your email might render in the client that causes many marketers headaches, you'll love inbox previews. Use inbox previews to fetch renderings of your email in over 80 email clients. No emulations, no simulations - all real devices.
Trying to tackle various email renderings is a monster of a project if you don't have tools to help you. Between different rendering engines, devices, operating systems, email clients, and screen sizes, it can be a difficult and disappointing guessing game to build for all of these variables.
But by previewing your email with Parcel inbox previews, you can take the guesswork out of the equation and rest assured that your email looks (and works) great.
As we were working with Parcel users on inbox previews a big question was pricing. Through those conversations, we decided to prioritize matching our pricing to how you use previews.
Almost everyone we spoke to tested in cycles. In extreme cases folks would use up to 10x more previews from one month to the next. And they had high-testers on their team and low-testers. Developers might use 5000 previews in a month and a designer just 10.
With this sort of usage being locked into a fixed number of previews or paying for each team member just doesn't make sense.
To combat this we've gone with a simple pay-as-you-go model. For just $49/month, you'll subscribe to 500 previews for your whole team. For the low usage months, your costs stay low. If you need to go beyond those 500 previews, you'll pay for each individual preview, no fixed lock-in. And to control your spending, each inbox preview can be refreshed independently, so you only use exactly what you need.
We have every confidence this pricing model will help you maximize your budget and control your spending. In fact, one of our early adopters decreased their fixed monthly costs by 12x.
Email service providers give you basic information about your email performance that can help enrich your future marketing campaigns. Things like open rate, click-through rate, and unsubscribe rate are all common metrics you might see in relation to email. But surely there's more to the story right?
Parcel Analytics will open up the world of email performance metrics and hone in on aspects your ESP might not be prioritizing building, like read time, geolocation, and a breakdown of opens that you shouldn't be counting, thanks to things like Apple Mail Privacy Protection.
Analytics will take your average engagement metrics and elevate them one step further. We've enriched the average reporting so you can get the most out of your campaign performance with metrics including:
- Read-time to give you insights into read or skim rate
- Forwards to show the impacts of those "forward to a friend" campaigns
- Opens broken down by those impacted by Apple MPP and not, so you can tell your manager (no, opens really are not a reliable success metric anymore, and here's the data to back it up)
Do you know where your subscribers like to hang out? Specifically, what email clients they gravitate towards? If you were to find out that 90% of your email subscribers were Outlook clients, would you design your emails differently?
So, with that in mind, you can find a breakdown of email clients from your respective sends with Parcel analytics!
Taking all this data and making good business decisions from it can be hard. To help you along with it, we've added a progressive enhancement chart so it is easy to see where you can innovate and help stand out in your subscribers' inboxes.
What happens in Parcel, stays in Parcel. Just kidding! Send your Parcel analytics data back to your data warehouse or CDP using a webhook. The data is yours to share!
Set up a custom domain for analytics so that you can trust the data you're viewing is unique to your emails only. Although the saying seems to go something like "sharing is caring" — we think that this should be exclusive to you.
Last but not least, we've got some performance improvements. Performance is never a particularly exciting thing. Like all infrastructure, you only notice it when it breaks. As we've developed Parcel and expanded its functionality, the file loading and previews have slowed down, especially for large files.
With this launch, we've improved our backend to be more resilient. You'll see fewer errors and faster previews.
From our real-world tests, we've seen previews load 2.3x faster and files load 8x faster than during the v1 launch.
And that's a wrap. We hope that these new updates make it easier and quicker to get top-notch emails created, approved, and out the door!
Happy sending,
Avi Goldman
Founder