What's New in Quickmail

A year ago, we decided to rebuild QuickMail from the ground up. Why? Because it had too many limitations and we had a much bigger vision for it.

Originally, QuickMail was a simple tool made to help automate sending out emails and follow-ups to get a reply. That said, over the years, more needs started to appear but weren't possible to satisfy because of the early design decisions. In short, we learned a lot about the needs of the community and decided to rebuild QuickMail with all that knowledge. It was a massive undertaking, much bigger than I though.

The result however? A massively better version in every way:

Previously, QuickMail's job was easy: to get a reply from a Prospect. Once that happened, QuickMail was "done" with them. So re-contacting old leads/prospects was a pain

There was no good solution. A Prospect had to be started on a Sequence manually or needed to be reset, losing their stats, to be able to use a Schedule, since they would only pick up Prospects in a Not Emailed state.

In the new version, we've solved this problem with Buckets instead of Groups:

A Bucket behaves a lot like a Group, except that Prospects are taken out of the bucket as soon as the schedule processes them. That way, the number of Prospects in a Bucket is the number of Prospects left to contact. Want to re-engage Prospects who've already ran a campaign in the past? Just put them back into a Bucket and have a Schedule pointed at it.

To prevent Prospects form running the same Campaign twice by mistake, we added an option in the Campaigns to prevent Prospects from starting the same Campaign twice, which is turned on by default.

We heard it again and again, "QuickMail is awesome but you guys should hire a professional UX designer...". We heard it loud and clear, people love our product but the learning curve was pretty steep and could be frustrating at times. At the time, no one told us "how" to solve it, otherwise it would have been much easier to act upon.

With our big focus on team collaboration in the new version, we got to solve the user-friendliness. So we did hire a professional UX designer, renamed a few items (Sequence into Campaign} to make it more intuitive, easier on anyone you need to bring onboard.

Feedback from early adopters so far has been super positive, and I learnt my lesson...

Basic with 2 inboxes or Pro with 4 inboxes, and Limits...

With the old version, we had no easy way to serve users who needed more inboxes than their plan specified, making it very difficult to extend beyond plans. Users were limited to 1 identity per account and so users on pro used 3 inboxes with aliases like sales@ instead of the real users.

The new version is way more aligned with this need / usage. Both Basic and Pro come with one inbox and you can scale them independently. That is you can stay on Basic and decide to add another inbox. No problem.

Each additional inbox will impact your subscription but each additional inbox will have its own identity and own email limit depending on the plan selected.

The difference between Basic and Pro is only access to feature now, not number of inboxes.

Need to manage multiple inboxes? In the past, one needed to create a sequence and assigned a special inbox to it. This led to many duplicated sequences, with each one specifying what inbox to use. This made A/B testing more difficult as all sequences needed to be modified.

Now, with campaigns, you can directly specify all the inboxes you want to participate and QuickMail will take care of distributing the next email to the correct inbox. You can now have your 3 sales rep using the best campaign without having them to copy/paste changes all the time. Or simply distribute the load across multiple inbox, while only maintaining 1 campaign.

Give multiple inboxes (identities) could share the same campaign, this caused problem for the signature. You can't sign Bob and send from Sarah's email address. So we introduced {{inbox.signature}} (that you can individually define in the inbox settings). No matter what inbox is being selected now, the proper identity of each inbox will be used to send the email. And if you want to throw an unsubscribe link in it to be 100% compliant with all your campaigns, using the unsubscribe link in your signature works wonder.

Want the same campaign but would like to insert a step in the middle or did you forget a step? No sweat, simply add a new step and move it up or down in the campaign. I can't believe we didn't put this earlier.

Tired of working alone? In the old version, we could give access to other people without having to exchange password but it was hard to know what each user did on the account. So we introduced an audit log that let you see exactly what people are doing on the account.

And since we only charge per inbox (not per team members), you can add as many VA, collaborators and contractors as needed without having to exchange login/passwords or pay anything extra. If anything goes wrong, you can simply review the audit log to easily figure out what happened.

Inboxing (not going to spam or promotional tab) is a hot topic these days, so we decided to provide an automated and easy way to check this in the new version. You will receive a weekly report telling you if your emails are inboxing or not, and you can trigger this manually should you need to run a quick check. We even keep the history of those tests so you can see how the health of your inbox evolves over time and let the inbox cool down a few weeks when emails start to hit spam until it's all good again.

In the previous version, people had no choice but to give their Google Drive permission if they wanted to add a Google inbox. This is no more the case, users can now add Google Drive separately. We never did anything else than importing the spreadsheet you needed, but we understand this was a problem with bigger corporations.

This also allow owners of Outlook inboxes to also add a Google Drive account without having to pay extra for an additional inbox, and unlike inboxes, Google Drive accounts don't have to be unique in our system so, owner of multiple QuickMail accounts can use the same Google Drive account across multiple QuickMail accounts (very useful for agencies sharing one big drive across multiple clients}

Adding variation just for deliverability was pretty heavy. This meant arbitrary splitting the sequence into many A/B tests to just have enough variation just so spam filters don't think that you are sending the same message over and over again. Yet, it made it hard to just look at stats since all variations had their own individual stats.

In the new version, you have the possibility to rely on Random Block. By using a special syntax, you can easily add random variation with no effort.

Start your variation with (( separate different version with | and close variations with )) E.g. ((Hi|Hello|Good day)) {{prospect.first_name}}. Each of those variation can have multiple lines and/or use custom attributes. So it's pretty powerful.

We also added a human-like sending option where time between sending emails is randomized (between values you can specify), making it harder to detect sending automation for spam filters as there is no obvious time pattern anymore (e.g. every 30 seconds).

And while we were at it, we moved tracking links to be 100% https (notice the S at the end for secure), that way this will have a slightly higher chance of deliverability when having open tracking turned on.

Users expressed the willingness to have the ability to personalize more and until now, the answer was to rely on custom attributes. In the new version, we introduced the ability to create drafts that you can review, modify (or not) and approve for sending. This allows you to write complete new chunks, personalization paragraphs, add PS... before the email is sent.

Until now, starting another sequence on user always started the email from nothing. Now, you can start a new campaign using the email received so your first email in the campaign will use the email received to reply. You can then easily build follow-up campaigns without losing the context. E.g. on reply, send a campaign that starts with "Thanks {{prospect.first_name}} for the email, let me get back to you on this, in the meantime, check out ...".

This also proves very useful for autoresponder for inbound leads (e.g. contact form on the website)

And cherry on top, we now keep conversations in a single thread so you will see all the emails of the same campaign neatly organized.

The current version never checked the spam and deleted item folders, but this caused some issues as some replies ended up in spam and QuickMail didn't have time to check the inbox before the user deleted some emails forcing users to rely on archiving them (and yes, it somehow feels wrong to archive bounces :)).

The new version checks in the spam/junk and delete folders and increased radically the frequency at which we check if a reply has been detected (12 times more often).

But we didn't stop there. If we detect a reply in the spam folder, we bring it back to the inbox so you don't even need to check your spam folder at all, and of course, we still detect replies coming from a different address.

Remember last time you tried to search for "First Name Last Name" and it didn't work because you had to either search for first name or last name? Well this is not a problem anymore and you can now search from any page in the application, we'll bring the result quickly in a sliding side panel so you won't even lose what you were working on, be it modifying a campaign, changing settings or just looking at your stats.

If you ever used zaps for handling prospects, you may have been annoyed at the need to create 2 zaps to create a prospect AND start a campaign, and running into issue if the prospect already existed (causing errors in Zapier's console). All these issue have been properly handled in the new version. You'll get all bundled into 1 Zap (create a Prospect and start a Campaign) and we nicely handle Prospects that have already been created, giving you the choice to still start them on a Campaign or silently ignoring them.

We did develop multiple tools to help you as an agency.

Many operations are available at the organization level (an organization owns multiple accounts), such as the library of campaigns. Each campaign can be saved in your library and loaded from another account, so you can setup new account in no time.

Zapier & Google Drive accounts will also be available at the organization level, so you don't need to configure each account the same way.

Oh and we now have centralized billing, meaning you have only one account getting charged. Need an account for 2 weeks? 20 days? When you cancel the account, the remaining time on the account is pro-rated. So you only pay for all your active accounts. Neat.