Show HN: Our 5 month project Airtime for Email

https://www.airtimehq.com

by dshipper • 14 years ago

66 33 14 years ago

meltzerj• 14 years ago

Oh yeah

kiwidrew• 14 years ago

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!

dshipper13• 14 years ago

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• 14 years ago

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.

atourgates• 14 years ago

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.

dshipper13• 14 years ago

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!

benjlang• 14 years ago

Wisestamp much?

dshipper13• 14 years ago

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

gsiener• 14 years ago

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.

dshipper13• 14 years ago

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 :)

matdwyer• 14 years ago

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.

dshipper13• 14 years ago

Good point. We tried doing something where if the same email thread was loading multiple banners we would only serve one - but good email services like GMail load an image once and then display it multiple times throughout the thread thus defeating our anti-annoyance measures :)

bks• 14 years ago

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.

AznHisoka3• 14 years ago

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.

dshipper13• 14 years ago

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.

AznHisoka3• 14 years ago

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.

a3_nm• 14 years ago

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?

dshipper13• 14 years ago

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• 14 years ago

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!

spung• 14 years ago

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

dshipper13• 14 years ago

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

eiji• 14 years ago

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.

dshipper13• 14 years ago

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• 14 years ago

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?

dshipper13• 14 years ago

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

jnorthrop• 14 years ago

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.

dshipper13• 14 years ago

Excellent point. Added to our todo list :)

Show HN: Our 5 month project Airtime for Email

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