• Skip to main content
  • Skip to footer

Dyspatch

  • Products
      • Overview
      • No-code email builder
      • Email collaboration
      • Interactive email
      • Template localization
      • Expert services
      • Overview

      By use case

      • Product reviews
      • Surveys
      • Add to cart
      • Calendar booking
      • Product carousel
      • Interactive polls
      • View all

      By vertical

      • SaaS
      • Ecommerce
      • Fintech
      • Travel
      • Healthcare
      • On-demand services
      Sendwithus Logo
      • Overview
      • Analytics
      • A/B testing
      • Triggered emails
  • Pricing
  • Case studies
  • Resources
    • Blog
    • Product shorts
    • Webinars
    • White papers
    • Ebooks, guides, & reports
  • Company
    • About us
    • Careers
    • Contact us
  • Login
    • Dyspatch
    • Sendwithus
Get a demo

Our Favorite Tools for Powering Happiness and Transparency

By Dyspatch | January 20, 2015 | Categories: News
⏱ 5 minute read

Last week, there was a thread on GrowthHackers about the ways in which different growth teams use Slack. I answered in the comments but thought it might be useful to run through a couple of points in more depth. Plus it’s a great opportunity to talk about two tools I absolutely love: Slack and Zapier.

First of all, one of the things I love most about Slack is that it combines the office chat mechanism with automated alerts. Everyone is already self-selected and subscribed to the relevant conversations. This is great for tracking errors, news, social media, and well pretty much whatever your team might deem important…

the slambot: reddit to zapier to slack

Tracking the very important things

One thing that people really seemed to appreciate in the GH thread was the idea of having a channel dedicated to the doling out of props. Intra-team commendations are always really helpful to keep everyone engaged in the project, and indeed we do these at our monthly all-hands meeting, but here at Sendwithus we also have a great system for sending love from our users directly to the team in real time.

sendwithus update log

As you can see, the update modal was a pretty recent addition to the app, but it brings with it the opportunity for our users to show their appreciation for the updates as we roll them out. What you can’t see from the above screencap is that when you click the heart, it gets piped directly to a slack channel:

liking product updates pipes to the slack channel

The other side of this coin is that we send help requests, bug reports, and the like from Freshdesk to our support channel using Zapier (more on that later.) This serves as a secondary archive of our help process and also exposes other people not responding directly to the issue to what’s going on.

Fun Fact: if you name a ticket a gif url, it will show up in slack

Fun Fact: if you name a ticket a gif url, it will show up in slack

Similarly, we have some of our other services hooked directly into slack to keep track of what’s going on. We send stripe notifications directly to their own channel that everyone can subscribe to. We’ve never been really explicit about this, but I think all these things kind of add up to a culture of transparency, which is something that is touted by a lot of startups but is always kind of tough to achieve elegantly.

new stripe payment notification

There are a ton of other random things that have their own channels: throughput volume alerts, deploy messages from fab, sentry errors, github commits/comments, and the like. But specific to growth, we send every instance of a new user signing up and either completing or skipping the onboarding process to a growth channel. We try and use this feedback to tailor the onboarding process (and definitely not to chastise users who submit help requests after skipping it…)

No Coding Necessary

One of my favorite slackhacks is to just source stuff through Zapier. If you’re unfamiliar, Zapier is a tool to basically mash APIs together without having to actually write code and it’s awesome. It’s a great way to get used to how APIs work, if you’ve never worked with them, and a killer shortcut if you just want a plug-and-play solution.

when twitter search matches, send slack message zap

Most teams already have someone with a social dashboard type setup but if you don’t have that kind of bandwidth or you want everyone on the team to be aware of what’s going on in social, it’s a great idea to pipe through all incoming and outgoing tweets. This has actually been huge on a few occasions when someone complained about something on twitter without submitting a help ticket – our engineers saw the tweet and got to work on a fix without having to wait for someone to bring it up.

We also have a beta integration with Zapier, so if you want to send emails from Sendwithus with these kinds of triggers, hit us up at beta@sendwithus.com or stay tuned, we should be announcing the integration in full really soon.

Another cool trick we squeezed out of Zapier is notifications from HNApp. Built by (fellow British Columbian) Nikita Gazarov, HNApp is basically an API for YCombinator’s HackerNews board. With it, you can turn an advanced search query into a simple RSS feed.

just search and copy the rss url

From there, dropping the feed into Slack is easy: just run your search and copy the RSS URL into Zapier, then tell it what Slack channel to send it to (you can even have it PM you things if you don’t want to bug everyone… or just make it look like you’re working when you’re reading HN.)
rss url into zapier

After a little bit of twiddling with the formatting, you can get live feeds from HN into the slack channel of your choice.

Similarly, if the conversations you’re looking for are more likely to be on Reddit, you can grab them straight through a built-in Zapier integration. It can match searches for your brand names or important phrases, but it can also just monitor a meaningful Subreddit, like the example at the top of this post.

configuration for a slambot of your own

When we look back on a billion dollar valuation and I’m being asked what was the single most important factor in our meteoric rise, I’ll know exactly what to credit: our team’s 100% awareness of every new Space Jam theme song mashup to hit the scene. I think the team would agree.

zapcutoff

Dyspatch

      Related Posts

    • Our SuperRewards case study is live on SendGrid!
    • Your New Email Super Power: Device Testing With Litmus
    • Tech Crunch Launch: We are part of Y Combinator W14!
    Tags: Sendwithus Archives
    Share this post:
    • Facebook
    • Pinterest
    • Twitter
    • Linkedin
    LET’S CHAT!

    Why wait? Take your email marketing to the next level today.

    Get a demo

    737 Fort Street,
    Victoria, BC
    V8W 1G9
    Canada

    • Phone 1-877-458-9231
    • Email us@dyspatch.io
    • Facebook
    • Twitter
    • Instagram
    • LinkedIn
    • YouTube

    Get the latest email strategies, tips, and trends right to your inbox.

    About Dyspatch

    • About us
    • Careers
    • Contact us
    • Pricing
    • Press & Media

    Features

    • Dyspatch overview
    • No-code email builder
    • Email collaboration
    • Email template localization
    • Apps in Email overview
    • Expert Services
    • Sendwithus Overview

    Email resources

    • Blog
    • Dyspatch product shorts
    • Webinars
    • White papers
    • Ebooks Guides & Reports
    • HTML email templates
    • Knowledge base
    • Email production glossary

    Integrations

    • Integrations overview
    • Email builder for Braze
    • Email builder for Iterable
    • Email builder for Salesforce Marketing Cloud
    • Email builder for Pardot
    • Email builder for SendGrid
    • Email builder for Marketo
    • Email builder for HubSpot
    • Email builder for Oracle Eloqua

    Dyspatch respectfully acknowledges the Lekwungen and W̱SÁNEĆ People, whose unceded territories we live and work on. We would also like to express our gratitude to all of the Coast Salish people as we continue to work and live as guests on their lands.

    We recognize that acts of colonization created many inequities for First Nations, Inuit, and Métis people. As a company, we acknowledge that we have a responsibility to work towards reconciliation and to remain open to suggestions and consultations, especially with Indigenous communities.

    Privacy policy    |    Terms of service    |    Web accessibility    |    Cookie policy    |    Usage    |    Sitemap

    Copyright © 2022 Techdrop Labs Inc. All Rights Reserved.

    Want a copy to-go?

    Get a PDF of this white paper complete with bonus resources, like a compatibility chart and curated reading list.

    White paper - everything you need to know about AMP for email
    Get a quote

    Get a demo

    Features & Functionality
     StarterTeamsTeams+
    Universal styling
    Drag and drop email builder
    Custom code editor
    Custom fonts
    Device specific elements
    Version history
    Social media link settings
    Commenting
    Live previews
    Dark mode previews
    Litmus testing
    Custom merge fields
    Image hosting
    Brand & legal compliance guardrails
    User role permissions
    ESP logic
    Code Export
    AMP Email Support
    Approval Workflows
    API Access
    User Management
    Translation (via Smartling)