You might wonder how the need arises for a software update and the resulting development process goes from start to finish. So, here’s a real world example from our own website. Prospective clients come to our website www.coretechs.com all the time looking for help with custom software development. They may spend some time on one of our advertising landing pages such as Python Development or they might find their way somewhere else. After reviewing our offerings, if they’ve decided they’d like to seriously consider our services they’ll send us a message on our Contact Page. However, sometimes they just want to test the waters and find out more information about our current services and hourly rate. In those cases they’d find themselves on our Pricing Guide page. By simply entering their email address that gives us enough information to send them an email with our Pricing Guide. That works pretty well, but here’s where the story starts on our quest to improve the process.

If the potential client provides a valid email address then they should get our Pricing Guide as sent via Sendgrid, one of the products we use for outbound SMTP mailing. However, as we all know, just because an email has been sent doesn’t mean that the end user will receive it. The email address can be poorly formatted or invalid. One of the intermediate services used for delivery such as Sendgrid can be having technical issues or a daily quota may have been reached. Once it arrives on the client side the client’s email server may determine that the email is spam or mark it for review. Finally, if the email gets all the way to the user’s email inbox then it could be marked as spam on that end or simply lost in an email box with thousands of unread messages. So, as you can see, the trip to actually being viewed by the end user is full of potential pitfalls at many steps in the process. And to validate this finding, we’ve gotten feedback from potential clients multiple times indicating they did not receive our Pricing Guide email. We don’t know exactly where the issue lies and can see from our end that it was sent, but bottom line, they didn’t see it.

So, based upon what we’ve already seen there are challenges to email delivery. We can work to create strong content, make sure our email sending reputation is high, but what else can we do? In this particular instance, we didn’t want to just present our pricing information to anyone. We wanted to at least get their email address to allow potential additional marketing. So, if they’ve entered their email, but we can’t be 100% certain they’ll receive the email from us, what other options do we have?

Since Sendgrid is such a large processor of email, sending over 100 billion emails per month, they have access to a tremendous amount of information. They’ve seen trillions of different email addresses and know which ones tend to get delivered and which don’t. Using that information Sendgrid provides a rating of every possible email address. They make this available as an API endpoint. We can make a call to that API to determine if the user has provided a likely valid email address even without the email ever being sent. So, we decided to modify our process. We would still try to send an email to anyone requesting our Pricing Guide. However, as an intermediate step, after the user has entered the email address and pressed submit, but before we provide a success message, we will send a request to the validation endpoint url from Sendgrid.

We did some testing and although there are no perfect indicators of email sending success we determined that 70% was a pretty good indicator. So, if a user enters their email address and Sendgrid scores that email at less than 70% we only send the email with the Pricing Guide. However, if the score provided is in excess of 70% then in addition to sending the email we modified the message on the success page. In those cases, we also provide a link on the success page for directly downloading the pricing guide. We can do this at this point because we’ve gotten a pretty strong indicator of likely success in sending the actual email. With this change we observe that there are now additional points of interaction with our potential client where they have further opportunities to see our pricing information and hopefully decide to move ahead with us as our client.

So, this is our window into the development process. I hope it’s provided you new insight into the software development process. If you think your team could benefit from the same thoughtful consideration with your development needs please give us a call at 202 540 0002 or drop us a message on our Contact Page OR check out our Pricing Guide page! 😉