Birdsend updates birdsend.co

Improvement

You can now preview their broadcast email message right in the email editor.

Just click the [Preview] button.

Then select desktop or mobile.

New

Previously, you could edit and customize the design of your email message by clicking the “html” button in our email editor >> then edit the html as you see fit.

You can also copy & paste an entire email HTML from an email template provider. However, sometimes the design of the email becomes wonky.

This is because BirdSend still houses the custom HTML content inside a “border”.

With this new custom HTML feature, you can copy & paste an entire email html from an email template provider. The design will look exactly like what you’d expect. No more wonky formatting.

This new custom HTML feature is only available for Broadcast emails at this time. We’ll build the Sequence emails version in a future update.

How to enable custom HTML in Broadcast emails

Go to the Broadcasts page >> click [New Broadcast].

You’ll be shown the following screen:

Choose “Custom HTML” >> click [Create].

After that, it’s a matter of following the simple on-screen instructions.

Improvement

The number of bots crawling sites and entering email addresses into opt-in forms is getting increasingly rampant.

This is why we’ve further tightened the security of your BirdSend opt-in forms to reduce fake sign-ups as much as much as possible.

The end result is you build a cleaner and less problematic email list.

Improvement

Previously, when you used the “link click to trigger popup on your site” feature, you’d have to set the URL where you want the popup to appear.

Now, you don’t need to set up the URL. You just need to surround your link with our shortcode. Whenever a visitor on your site clicks the link, it’ll trigger the popup.

Improvement

When a new user imports thousands to tens of thousands of contacts into BirdSend, the 1st email message to the newly imported contacts will be throttled.

All ESPs do this, so no surprise there.

But for this new improvement, the throttle settings are further refined, so that we further improve our already great deliverability.

Because when it comes to improving, it’ll never be “done”. There will always be things that you can improve.

We can’t reveal too much info because it’s sensitive — we don’t want spammers trying to game the system.

Improvement

With accounts more than 100k contacts, the load time on that page was somewhat slow.

So a few months ago, we’ve started researching into solutions to solve this problem. And we decided to ditch MySQL in favor of MongoDB.

Because the team has no experience in MongoDB, and also because we process process lots of data — it took us quite some time to implement this.

Currently, this is already live in a small portion of users’ accounts. Once everything’s okay, we’ll release this upgrade to all users’ accounts.

If you have less than 100k contacts, you might not notice the load time improvements on the Contacts page though.

Improvement

Previously on the Dashboard page, you can only see a maximum of 1 tag for each new contact.

But a contact can have multiple tags.

E.g. John has these tags: subscriber, customer product A, customer product C.

Previously we’d only show you ONE of the tags, which was not ideal because you weren’t able to quickly glance through how many leads were gained for a specific tag.

With this new update, we show you all the tags.

Now you see a new black line that denotes the number of new contacts you got for a specific date. While the yellow bars represent the tags. If a contact has 10 tags, we’ll display ALL tags when you mouseover the bars.

So the line can be higher or lower than the bars. A lower line could mean a contact has multiple tags, and a higher line could mean some contacts don’t have a tag.

New

BirdSend already has the “Preview Text” feature — the text that immediately follows the subject line. This is used to tease subscribers to open your email.

To take this a step further, we implemented a “blank line” Preview Text, that looks like this:

Why a blank line?

Can you guess?

Yes! So that your email looks different than all the other emails in the inbox — i.e. your email stands out in a crowded sea.

Improvement

We’ve made improvements to our 1-Page Sequence Builder to make the creation and edit of email messages in the sequence more seamless.

For example:

• Previously when adding a new email to the sequence, the page would instantly refresh (which is a bit annoying). Now it doesn’t.

• Previously when the user momentarily stops typing (because he’s thinking of what to type) and before the auto-save kicks in, he can switch to other emails in the sequence. Result is the latest work is not saved. We’ve fixed this so that user can only switch to other emails after the auto-save kicks in.

Improvement

We’ve introduced stricter measures for our spam score checker.

While we can’t disclose the details for security purposes, this initiative is to further enhance our deliverability and mailing reputation.