

Show HN: Our 5 month project Airtime for Email - dshipper
https://www.airtimehq.com

======
kiwidrew
What if the recipient's user agent does not display images? At least with a
text-based signature, the message still goes through, even if it isn't fancy.

Actually, as a recipient, I'd be annoyed to have this trigger gmail's "show
images?" dialog, only to find upon choosing "display images" that the only
thing I get is... a marketing message from the sender.

That said, I still love the idea!

~~~
dshipper
Thanks for the feedback! If the recipient's user agent doesn't display images
we don't record an impression, and so it doesn't show up in the analytics.

I totally understand that it might be annoying to only get a marketing message
from clicking "Display Images". I guess the way I look at it is that it's a
chance for companies you're already interacting with to tell you things about
themselves that you might not already know - so it might be annoying or if you
like the company it might be cool too.

It's also an amazing platform for organizations like schools, charities and
political campaigns to do outreach with. For example, a charity can have their
big donors install this in their signature and have a unified, centrally
controlled donation message going out every day that's always current and
updated.

Thanks again for the feedback!

~~~
jorgem
There was some guy, on HN recently, who could convert any image to CSS (kindof
hacky) -- CSS is always displayed, even if browser won't show images.

You will wouldn't have analytics, but at least the ad would display.

~~~
dshipper
Wow I'd love to look at that project. The one problem is that we don't always
have access to the actual HTML of the emails being sent out.

For example, you can integrate Airtime with GMail but Gmail doesn't actually
allow you to play with HTML tags. You have to do it by inserting an image and
then linking the image by hand. Effectively it's the same result, but it
really limits our options in terms of styling etc.

------
eiji
A real "About Us" section would be nice. No marketing unit is going to do
business with two twitter accounts.

And IMHO don't use twitter accounts with your position on SOPA. 95% of your
customers don't care or don't (want to) know.

~~~
dshipper
Great points all. About Us section is coming ASAP. Agree on the SOPA banners
as well. Thanks for taking the time to let us know.

------
prawn
Viewing the site on a landscape iPad, all you see is the first screenshot and
a pricing button. There's no visible scrollbar or hint at more content further
down the page. At first, I thought it was a bit strange that you would throw
people straight to your pricing info without further explanation - only
realised there was more on the front door when I came back to it a second
time. Might be worth tweaking the sizing so in this format you get a small
hint that the content continues?

~~~
dshipper
Thanks for the heads up we'll check it out!

------
jnorthrop
It looks like a nice service but you really need a privacy policy. What data
are you storing, what are you going to do with that data and what can I do to
opt-in or out?

I can't imagine many organizations getting clearance to use this without that.

~~~
dshipper
Excellent point. Added to our todo list :)

------
matdwyer
I use standard images (three of them) linked to my Facebook, Testimonials, and
Twitter - they do end up getting a lot of hits so I see the benefit in
something like this. Not sure if I would go through the hassles of tracking
email opens for my conversations with people though.

I also find that when the emails are coming back it is quite annoying to have
all the image placeholders in the conversations.

~~~
bks
Agreed on having the standard icons in the footer. I do like the idea of being
able to update the marketing message so if someone opens an old email - they
are current with the brand message.

I also include my photograph in every outgoing message - a little corny, but
it does help at subsequent networking events.

------
atourgates
This looks like a fantastic premise, but could where can I get more details
about how it's implemented?

I work at an ad agency, and every single client we have wants a fancy email
signature, but it's always a huge pain in the ass to get it implemented in a
way that works properly company-wide, and looks good across multiple email
clients.

~~~
dshipper
Thanks! It's just a simple HTML snippet that gets inserted into their emails.
The snippet contains an image that we change on the server side. It's gets a
lot more complicated than that, but that's the basic premise. I'd love to chat
more some time - feel free email me at dan@airtimehq.com if you're interested!

------
gsiener
Cool concept, I can imagine this getting into enterprise emails everywhere.

Anyone interested in rolling their own should check out Movable Ink
(<http://movableink.com>) -- dynamic content for email.

~~~
dshipper
Thanks for the feedback. Yep Moveable Ink has similar technology and they're a
great startup. Our product is just a bit more targeted to marketing :)

------
AznHisoka
Who's the target market for this? Most marketing teams want analytics on the
actual links in the email body, rather than the signature. And if they had
that in place, then tracking the signature is pretty simple addon.

~~~
dshipper
Any company with employees that send out a lot of email every day. So for
example if you have a big sales team, the marketing department doesn't have to
tell them "Ok this week we want to talk more about widgetX" instead all they
have to do is upload one banner and instantly every email that the sales team
sends out has a banner a banner talking about the widgetX".

It's also great for charities, schools and political campaigns to raise money.

~~~
AznHisoka
I don't think that would be as effective as a single email devoting to
marketing it, so the value of your product wouldn't be as high.

For charities, yes I see the value, although I'm not sure if that is a huge
revenue source.

~~~
mediaman
As someone with a decent annual investment in salespeople and customer service
staffers, this product looks incredibly valuable, and one of our marketing
members is looking into becoming a subscriber because it solves an important
hassle point for her.

Broad 'newsletter' emails don't get read as much, because they're not going to
contain specific relevant information to customers' existing orders or other
information they need.

In contrast, a service like this allows a little promotional banner to be
shown to customers who are almost certainly going to be reading the email,
because they are placing an order, checking up on an order, or inquiring about
a product. And below the email from the salesperson/CSR, you can promote a
relevant product or message that is highly likely to get read. The traditional
way has been to badger salespeople until they change their signature, which
doesn't work very well. Now, it's all automatic.

To the founders: there are a lot of people on here who seem not to understand
your product. That's OK, I don't think they're in your target market and don't
appear to have the painpoint you're solving. In most of traditional corporate
America, this is a big pain point you're solving, especially for the poor
marketing people who are tired of trying to get those signatures updated.

~~~
AznHisoka
But wouldn't a text signature be many times more effective then an image that
may not even appear in some mail clients?

~~~
mediaman
I don't know the answer. It might. In general, graphics have better CTR (at
least in my industry, which is not as tech savvy), but you're correct that
image blocking counteracts that to some degree. It's worth doing a trial and
seeing which performs better.

------
a3_nm
How does this work? I thought that most email clients these days tried to
avoid tracking by refusing to display external images by default. Am I missing
something?

~~~
dshipper
It's just an image in the bottom of the email. Many clients do avoid tracking
but many don't. For example on an iPhone all images are loaded by default.
Additionally a lot of people press "Display Images Below".

Initially I thought that images being blocked would be the biggest hurdle to
this project, but it was being used prelaunch by 20 customers and we served
over 110,000 impressions during that time (an impression isn't recorded if the
image is blocked).

~~~
mbesto
Not to discredit you, but this doesn't sounds very compelling: "Many clients
do avoid tracking but many don't."

Any percentage number to back up that claim? 110,000 impressions out of how
many? Also what's the conversion? Would be interesting to see more research
into this (and articulated on the website).

Other than, looks coo1! Good luck!

~~~
dshipper
Thanks for the feedback! It's impossible for us to tell what percentage of the
total number of emails sent the 110,000 impressions represents because our
server only gets hit when images are loaded. If images aren't loaded our
server is never hit, and it's as if the email was never sent.

The total CTR across all 110,000 impressions was 0.42%, however we log an
impression both when an email is being composed and when it is read on the
other end. So if we discount the false positives for composing impressions
then the CTR jumps to around 0.91% which is incredibly high given that the
banners are not at all optimized.

We're working on better analytics to be able to separate legitimate
impressions from composing impressions, but don't quite have that
functionality yet.

Thanks again for commenting I really appreciate it!

------
spung
Great idea, and I love your guys' design! Did you guys design it yourselves or
use a toolkit?

~~~
dshipper
Thanks so much! It's mostly done by hand but the buttons are from Foundation:
<http://foundation.zurb.com/>

------
benjlang
Wisestamp much?

~~~
dshipper
You can definitely use this with WiseStamp although that's not the recommended
path to integration :)

------
meltzerj
Oh yeah

