How Urbandoor moves faster when testing and iterating on email content
Executive summary
Urbandoor is a global marketplace for furnished apartments built for professionals. Unlike other home rental sites, there are no private homes or hosts, only vetted properties and providers that are better equipped to meet the needs of busy professionals traveling for work or relocating.
As a marketplace, Urbandoor facilitates both commerce and communication between those who provide accommodation and the people who book with them, which means every email they send is business-critical.
The challenge
Originally a Sendwithus customer, Urbandoor was initially looking for an all-in-one email template management solution. However, as a global business requiring GDPR compliance, Urbandoor made the switch to Dyspatch.
“The move to Dyspatch was mostly driven by the need to be GDPR compliant. But it was also better architecture for us because it eliminated any need for another third party in the critical path of sending an email.”
Dave Greenstein, Chief Architect & Head of Growth at Urbandoor
Enter Dyspatch
As an added bonus, Urbandoor has found that Dyspatch is a much better architectural fit, sitting, as it does, outside the critical path of email. Every email Urbandoor sends is business-critical — customers not receiving emails is the equivalent of a service outage. Because these emails are so important, Urbandoor needs an email template management solution that remains out of that critical path, in order to remove any risk associated with non-technical users deploying email into production.
Dyspatch meets Urbandoor’s needs by allowing non-engineers to collaborate on transactional email without the risk of breaking anything. The platform provides a balance between facilitating improved collaboration while safeguarding their production systems.
Dyspatch also integrates well with Urbandoor’s continuous integration process, allowing testing of all emails before they go into production. As long as they write good tests, Urbandoor can rest easy that deploying an email will not break their production system.
The Dyspatch solution
Dave Greenstein, Chief Architect & Head of Growth at Urbandoor, described the implementation process as ‘ridiculously easy’. The most time consuming — and tedious — part of the process was importing their existing templates. But with four API points, “[Implementation] couldn’t have been easier,” says Greenstein.
Urbandoor has also found the Dyspatch team to be very helpful, as well as responsive to feedback and feature requests.
“The team’s openness about where Dyspatch is at is definitely something that influenced our decision. How transparent they’ve been about the product roadmap and release dates has all been great.“
Dave Greenstein at Urbandoor
The results
Dyspatch helps Urbandoor move faster when testing and iterating on email content. Because Dyspatch allows even non-technical users at Urbandoor to create and change emails faster, Urbandoor’s ability to run experiments has improved dramatically, since it doesn’t have to be an engineer changing something in the code every time they want to test a change. This has allowed them to do more than just optimize transactional email content, they have the flexibility to innovate.
“[Because of its] nice API and its great template management system, we’re able to integrate Dyspatch with our continuous integration build system, so all the tests get run on approved Dyspatch templates before the emails make it into production. So as long as we write good tests, then we should never break our production emails again. Dyspatch is just a better architecture for anyone who is doing continuous integration.”
Dave Greenstein at Urbandoor
The future
With internationalization becoming increasingly important for Urbandoor, Dyspatch’s localization support will play a key role. To create localized versions of each template, they need simply download a Portable Object Template (POT) file to be forwarded to their translation team or vendor. They can then upload a Portable Object (PO) file, containing the returned translations, to Dyspatch, which are automatically associated with the correct template, ready for testing before being submitted for approval.
With support for 40 languages in over 60 countries around the globe — and more to come — Dyspatch is ready for every new market Urbandoor enters.
“The thing that’s most impressed me about Dyspatch is that the team’s been able to keep it a really simple product to use. It just fits perfectly, solving an extremely important problem problem that lots and lots of companies have – managing email content. Dyspatch becomes a pretty critical piece, but one that fits perfectly into a more complex email architecture.”
Dave Greenstein at Urbandoor
About Urbandoor
Urbandoor is a global marketplace for furnished apartments specifically built for professionals. Its mission is to effortlessly connect professionals with their right apartment every time, anywhere.
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