How SocketLabs Gives Customers an Edge in Deliverability
CMO Lauren Meyer shares what makes their platform stand out from the crowd and where they are headed next.
Welcome to a new era of interviews and spotlights for Scaling CRM. In the below Q&A, I chat with Lauren Meyer (CMO of SocketLabs).
Lauren is a titan in our industry (and a Deliverability savant) and I personally was very curious to learn more about what SocketLabs is building.
The vendor marketplace can be overwhelming for decision-makers and there are so many examples of products and service providers fighting the good fight and shipping amazing work. My goal is to make some of that research a little easier for all of you.
So, without further ado, here is my interview with Lauren about SocketLabs.
Q. SocketLabs was founded in 2007. Can you share some insight on its growth over the years?
It’s been quite the journey! We started with an on-prem solution, our Hurricane MTA, and moved it into the Cloud a year later. Since then, we’ve innovated beyond simply sending email, developing a StreamScore to help senders understand their performance while sending from our platform. Now we’re here to support complex senders like ESPs and multi-tenant senders to not just send email easily, but manage their entire infrastructure with ease. No code!
The email industry has seen a lot of innovation within the past 15 years. We’ve had some of the best minds in the industry lending their expertise to SocketLabs during every phase of our development, and that certainly hasn’t changed today. I’m excited to start talking publicly about where we’re going next.
Q. There are more ESP and marketing automation platforms than ever before. What makes SocketLabs unique and why do you recommend it being on the short-list of platforms for decision-makers to consider?
The unique thing about SocketLabs is our mission to support other ESPs rather than only being an ESP ourselves. Lots of complex senders use other ESPs to facilitate their email activity because it allows them to focus on creating powerful features for their customers on the front end while someone else manages their email pipes on the back end. We provide the same opportunity, but we make it easier to manage the entire process. Think of us like an ESP-in-a-box that has everything you need to get started (batteries included!) without all the custom building required when using a platform built for direct senders.
When sending email is essential to your business but not the main focus, the last thing you want to do is dedicate hours (sometimes days) of your month to it. Time is precious and should be reserved for scaling your business. But, when something is preventing your customers’ emails from reaching the inbox, you have to drop everything and figure out what’s going on, fast.
With our codeless platform, it’s simple to send mail, track performance, and quickly identify problems needing your attention before they snowball. Through this efficiency, you can provide your customers with better, faster, and more proactive performance and insights while automated rules work behind the scenes to sort, route, and handle different kinds of mail, automate IP warmups, and alert your customers (or internal teams) at the first sign of a problem.
Q. Who are your primary customers today and are there any instances where you would admit to SocketLabs not being a great fit?
SocketLabs supports highly complex senders and service providers in a variety of industries from marketing automation to website and domain-hosting providers to ecommerce, higher education, IoT…you name it. We also have plug-and-play solutions for direct senders who want a simple way to send email via SMTP or API.
To be clear, though: We’re not a marketing automation tool and we’re also not a deliverability-focused add-on. Simply put, we’re a really reliable email-sending platform, especially for senders who need support and simplicity on a large scale. If you have subaccounts needing close monitoring and management, we’re a good fit. If you’re looking to have a full marketing automation solution where you can create customer journeys and such, we aren’t a good fit.
Q. Tell us more about proprietary features that are unique to SocketLabs.
Our new platform for complex senders is full of features you cannot find elsewhere, actually. Beyond the technology being a comprehensive solution for ESPs and similar senders, which doesn’t exist today outside SocketLabs, we have some unique components of the platform.
StreamScore is a proprietary algorithm analyzing more than 35 first- and third-party data points and baking them into one simple score senders and service providers can use to stay apprised of any potential issues with sender reputation across their platform. When used in tandem with our new StreamMonitor, we’re able to assign an Urgency Score to each subaccount based on not only a sender’s StreamScore, but additional data to actually predict negative drops in performance. This predictive feature allows for unprecedented proactivity rather than reactive mitigation. On average, we see a 24-48 hour lead time on issue detection compared to the signals our competitors are flagging.
Guided Insights is another proprietary feature in which we’ve made it simple to dig deeper into subaccount performance. If there is an increase in bounces, you can drill down into a table listing where the bounces occurred and why in five clicks or less. You can then draw quick conclusions. Is it a blocklisting issue? Is it a jump in addresses bounced because of typos? Is there a problem with authentication? With this info, you can spend your time guiding senders into better, more productive sending practices or resolving issues with mailbox providers (MBPs) instead of searching for problems like they’re needles in a haystack.
Q. Your website makes claims around inbox placement and deliverability optimization. What’s the secret sauce and why do you think most ESPs choose to be deliverability agnostic?
For as long as I can remember, deliverability has been referred to as a dark art. It lives inside a black box, rarely understood, leaving many email senders believing their ESP is responsible for getting their mail to the inbox, not them. Yet deliverability sits at the intersection of email strategy, infrastructure, compliance, and security. It is a cornerstone of success for anyone sending email at scale.
Our secret sauce? Recognizing the deep connection between all of these disciplines. Our team has spent over a decade in the trenches learning exactly what it takes to optimize infrastructure, deliverability, security, and email ROI. We understand ESPs and email senders have a shared responsibility for their sender reputation and both need to take conscious steps toward following best practices (and analyzing their performance data!) if they wish to consistently reach the inbox.
Our new email platform combines all the tools and functionality needed to make email better and easier to manage at scale by enabling ESPs and senders to quickly and easily understand their email performance, proactively spot issues, and know exactly where to focus their energy to make the biggest impact.
Q. How about services? What elements of the relationship does SocketLabs hand-hold by default vs. what are the optional upgrades?
Services are part of the package! All of our complex senders receive our expert support services as a built-in part of the deal. There are no hidden costs or upcharges for access to knowledge. We provide senders with as many resources as we can to help allow for independence and confidence, but when a question arises or an issue is uncovered where the sender needs more support, we’ll bring our more than 130 years of email experience to your side as your partner. Why settle for less?
Q. What about multi-channel and app integrations? How flexible is SocketLabs today?
Our email platform was created from the ground up with complex senders in mind. Built within an API-first environment with native subaccount functionality, we’ve made it as easy as possible to plug our in-depth data and tools into an existing platform to support users in a familiar and intuitive place, providing end-customers the ability to see their StreamScore and other deliverability insights. This is a perk for the ESP because they can charge a little more for this data without requiring more time and energy from their internal teams, and their senders get clearer insights for proactive optimization without needing to rely (or wait) on their ESP for an answer or solution.
ESPs don’t even need to loop our platform into theirs, but can instead arm their customer-facing teams with our data to provide better insights and services to your senders if you do choose to charge more for services. They’ll be able to detect and diagnose issues without hours of work, making services much easier to scale.
Q. You have an exciting new product out that allows SocketLabs to act as the backend. How does this work exactly, and how does it fit into your growth vision?
It’s become quite common for ESPs to use other ESPs’ back-end infrastructure. For instance, senders could use an omnichannel marketing automation provider’s platform to send email while remaining totally unaware the email is actually going through the pipes of a different ESP than their platform provider.
The majority of multi-domain senders find it much easier to purchase an existing MTA-in-the-cloud than build their own solution. However, using a provider like SendGrid still requires a lot of post-purchase infrastructure building and customizing. It also requires multiple skill sets across the organization to be involved with even minor changes to the sending infrastructure, such as IP assignments.
With our codeless email management platform, it truly is a plug-and-play solution. You only need to know a bit of code to set up the instance, and then you’ve got code-free management from there on out. You can manually or automatically reassign IPs to different IP pools. You can pipe near-real-time data into an existing UI. You can do it all independently.
For SocketLabs’ growth, this sending platform represents a community of senders who are historically underserved. Now, with the growth of omnichannel marketing and greater interest in things like SMS marketing, email management is even less supported than other tactics. We’re eager to become the most reliable, supportive, and intuitive platform for every ESP or complex sender who needs to be agile, proactive, reliable, and supported when they need it.
Q. What’s the best way for decision-makers to learn more about SocketLabs?
Our website is a great place to start. You’ll find details about the features and services I’ve mentioned today and the benefits you can expect when partnering with SocketLabs. You can take a self-guided tour using this link, and if you like what you see, please contact us to learn more.
Alternatively, connect with me on LinkedIn! I love talking about email, and would be more than happy to answer questions about what we’ve built. It’s one of my favorite topics, actually. :)