How an email deliverability SaaS can supercharge performance
About Folderly
Vladyslav: Folderly is an email solution platform, and the main thing about Folderly is that we are not just sending emails like a usual outreach solution. We step far away from that, we are on the side of technical infrastructure on the main side of things, mailbox, email service providers, content, etc. We are building the platform with many solutions to supercharge email marketing as an acquisition channel. And the main goal of all of those solutions is to increase the effectiveness of your email marketing channels by increasing open rates, replay rates, and CTRs, and in the end, get a return on investments from email.
Over 50% of global emails are heading to spam
Vladyslav: From a recent report from Deloitte, 50-60% of global emails going back and forth are landing in the spam folder. There are many reasons for hitting this number. For instance, people use bat spam boards, like click here or win there, as the most common, the more intelligent things people messed up with. Here’s how the email marketing flow looks for a junior marketing specialist. You have one tool like HubSpot, Outreach, or whatever tool you use. You will then upload, split the content, and hit the send button.
After you get some results from your working campaigns and after a few days, those results are gone. No one is replying to your emails. You’re wondering why, and there are a lot of missed sequence steps that you forgot to do with your campaigns before, like setting upright your domain. For instance, you need to know this boring stuff about DNS records, how to do the right stuff with the DNS records like SPF Demark, DKIM record, BMI record, and then the thing that this common knowledge to start the email marketing campaign.
On the other hand, you have a mailbox, which is also not that simple. You have those huge players like Google with Gmail or Microsoft with Outlook, and they have their own limitations. How many emails can you send per day, mailbox, week, month, etc.? And even though you send emails when you are completely set up everything, there is one more problem to solve. How do those people receiving your emails from you interact with them? They can just hit the spam button, and you will end up in the spam by the end of the day. And this is called a feedback loop from a Google perspective.
With Folderly, we’re starting to solve all of those problems, even though it was the feedback loop. We are integrating heavily and closely with API to Google, Microsoft, Amazon’s AWS, and others. And then, I guess by the end of the year, we’ll hit 500 ESP integrations under Folderly, and we analyze how people set up their entities, the domain mailboxes. Content leads at the end and help them solve all those problems for each mailbox or domain that they have spam problems; we know how to solve it by pressing start monitor under the default layer.
How do you implement Folderly?
Vladyslav: Everything starts with the input data. We need to understand what domain, what kind of email address, and what email service provider they are at. After that, we start to set up the domain and mailbox after they connect their domain and mailbox. Then the next step would be to analyze their content on the spam boards and the usability of the content. Each email service provider has a potential recipient of your emails on all those 500 email service providers. And the most common of them are obviously Google and Microsoft. They have 30% of the market share. We are giving the users information about what kind of result they can expect from each and every email service provider. You need to be in touch with your domain and mailbox health daily to utilize the email marketing channel for your business.
Folderly costs
Vladyslav: The more mailboxes you have under the system, the cheaper it is. The pricing starts from 200 bucks per mailbox, which is kind of expensive, but if you are willing to connect 10, 15, or 50 mailboxes, it’s starting to be like 50 bucks per mailbox or so. Our main feature is the Pulse, monitoring the constant email testing. This is the main core of all email deliverability side of things, which is connecting all of those input data and getting the results for our clients.
Why Folderly is unique amongst its competitors
Vladyslav: There is a simple answer for that. All of our competitors enable the deliverability side of things in the field of site or perspective. They’re not our competitors because they utilize the standard protocols for sein, receiving chemos, SMTP, and IMAP. While we heavily integrate with API and have a closer relationship with those huge ESPs, it helps us to solve those problems and get on the side of mailbox and domain because we integrate with the API and not just the SMTP app and explain all those things. With SMTP, you just need to hit the mailbox and end up with the connection to your mailbox and with the API. It’s a single-click connection, which helps us to analyze more data, get more access to data, and in the end, solve the problem.
Faced this problem with their outbound agency
Vladyslav: We started Folderly almost two and a half years ago when we hit a problem with our service agency. It is called Belkins, a sales and marketing agency whose goal is to make an appointment setting, B2B appointment setting. We have been building Belkins for five years already, and we have more than 1000 clients there, recurring active clients month by month. And now we manage up to 5,000 mailboxes daily. We have our own email deliverability department, so this is one of the new departments that I build within Belkins. And when we started to solve the problem for ourselves.
How do you divide your time between the agency and the SaaS?
Vladyslav: This is a great question, right? Luckily, I have my partners over the Balkans and splitting the 50-50 time, but it depends. For Belkins, we hit operational effectiveness, and there is no such involvement from my end. I’m just the guy who wants to scale those things up to 10,000 people there. We’re doing the new departments and new people there, and I’m just disrupting some of our current processes, but the main focus is on the products. I’m the guy who is a builder within. We also have a few more products, and one is part of our long-term product strategy.
Separate teams for each one
Vladyslav: On the Folderly side, it’s 42 people, while on the Belkins side, I think it’s 300, and they’re huge. This is the one reason to build products. You wouldn’t have 1000 people to build the product, and you just need the core 50 people to build a good technical enterprise. They are separate companies, and they are utilizing sources of their own. There is no need to use Belkin’s resources, even though we are already profitable. We are investing that money heavily for further growth, and we just like this huge experience.
One of the more remarkable things with Balkans that we’re having inside our company is a lot of clients starting from a lot of verticals. We keep close touch with the market on every side of the business as the side of niches. We understand how to do things, how to do marketing, how to make sales, and it’s really helpful to build those products because we know what kind of works there in this kind of region, in this particular industry.
Bootstrapping two companies at the same time
Vladyslav: We are 100% bootstrapped, and I have a co-founder, Michael. From a partnership standpoint, Michael and I are always looking for partners who handle the main frameworks, and by frameworks, I mean CTOs, COOs, and all those other people within these kinds of functional frameworks. We already have almost all of them. There are a lot of stories of my friends who are raising crazy, and they tell me why are you bootstrapping? They’re facing so many troubles when I explain how we are doing this, and they just do not understand us.
My team really likes what they’re doing, and the idea that we’re handling all processes, and no guy is telling us what to do. There is nothing wrong with venture capital or any funding because you can gather like right partnerships, and it’s not just the money. There’s the network and the potential technology, partnership, etc.
Why email marketing is the most cost-effective acquisition channel
Vladyslav: Outbound has short-term results that you’re gathering from email marketing. Email marketing is a cost-effective acquisition channel, and it’s really cheap. And if you’re doing this the right way, you’re generating the appointments, you are getting the sales, and meanwhile, you’re building your entire inbound strategy by using the content strategy behind. Outbound works almost all the time. And even though when we started Belkins, we outrebounded our first client, and after that, we decided to build a company around that. In my opinion, outbound is the key to doing your testing. Start a few meetings to understand if your product is fit. Outbound is the cheapest way, and email marketing is the right thing to do.
How important was personal branding to your success?
Vladyslav: I’m just testing LinkedIn’s algorithm after the Microsoft acquisition. They’re really simple, you are just doing constant content daily, and you’re starting to see your awareness of each and every like posting you made there. I did this for four months daily, including the weekend days. And by the end of this kind of experiment, I’m starting to hit 5,000-100,000 brand impressions over every post. And this is huge because everyone is reposting and sharing, and you can really like this thought leadership thing.
My tips would be to make a constant effort to create content, comment on something, and remind yourself to do this on a daily basis. And this almost works with every social media. I’ve already hit 20,000 followers, and it’s continued to grow. It’s starting to generate interest from the outside audience, and they start to ask you a question, start to comment on your post, and in the end, convert as clients because they’re following you because you are honest.
What is your favorite software, Vladyslav?
Vladyslav: Zapier is the god of tools because you always have a Zapier to connect something with something, and almost every company has an integration with Zapier. Basically, Zapier integrates one tool with another, and they have already built some integration with OpenAI’s ChatGPT. Zapier is a cool tool. And Jira is always Jira for any development team.
