New Product: Spotlight Reporting for Your ESP

Big news, folks. We’ve got a brand-new product available, and you don’t even need to send email through our infrastructure to use it. It’s called SocketLabs Spotlight, and it’s a multi-feature, comprehensive reporting platform enhanced with the power of Snowflake® technology. 

If you’re a Twilio SendGrid® customer, you can now purchase our reporting suite. Send via Sinch Mailgun®, MessageBird®, or Amazon® SES? Soon you’ll have these capabilities available to you as well! 

An Email Reporting Experience Like None Other 

We get it. You like sending with SendGrid®. They’re great at a lot of things, one of which is…well, sending emails! But sometimes their platform could leave some corners of your performance pretty shadowy. You might have blind spots without knowing it. 

That’s where we come in. Don’t fly blind. Let’s look at SocketLabs Spotlight reporting. 

More Insight, More Opportunity 

More is more, and more is better. Make use of all your email data with our visualizations and baked-in guidance to supplement what you already get from SendGrid.

More Ways to Analyze 

You’ll start at your sending overview, where you’ll see all account-wide activity. This dashboard is highly customizable with more than a dozen filters so you can visualize your data in the most effective way possible for your needs. You can start as high-level as sticking to the account overview and filter down all the way to the recipient-level. 

Have a decisionmaker who needs info at-a-glance? You can build a dashboard to their specs, save it, and share it. Need specific views and details for a different stakeholder? Create, save, share. 

When you need to communicate important email performance insights, such as a diagnostic nugget like a problematic practice, to people who do not have access to the platform, you can choose one of multiple report types available, including Sending Overview, Delivered & Failed Messages, Complaints, Engagement Tracking, Message Detail, and Mailings Report.  

At the top of your sending overview dashboard sits your StreamScore. Calculated using more than 35 data points including both internal and external data (like info from Microsoft SNDS and Google Postmaster Tools), it will give you a fast look at your overall reputation. We’ll tell you more about this a little later in the blog.  

Proactive Trend Spotting 

Seeing historical performance is great, but now you can use SocketLabs Spotlight to turn that data into predictive performance indicators. Our platform looks at multiple data points over a course of both 3- and 14-day spans to spot emerging trends to help predict performance issues before they occur.  

Now you can decrease panic-driven reactions and embrace proactive prevention.  

Beyond the in-the-moment trend analysis, you can load up to 13 months of aggregate data in less than 60 seconds to quickly identify where changes in performance occurred, when they started, and what might explain those trends. Add in a little year-over-year analysis and planning just got way easier. 

Ease-of-use 

Forget downloading CSV files or spending hours digging through data. Our dashboards aggregate different kinds of data for you, letting you analyze not just in a ton of new ways, but analyze quickly and easily to whatever specs you might desire.  

In addition to giving you the ability to dive right into a haystack anytime you want to find the needle yourself, we actually crunch numbers for you. 

Number-crunching is a great intro into more detail about StreamScore.  

StreamScore compiles more than 35 internal and external data points to calculate a holistic reputation score with four categories designed to highlight what is causing a negative impact. These categories include audience, engagement, reputation, and security, and are major factors in deliverability.  

If you want even more information about StreamScore, click right here, but the thing to know is this: You can get a great sense of your reputation without being a deliverability specialist.  

Our platform was built API-first, too, so your StreamScore (and any other pre-analyzed numbers we’ve provided) can be pulled from our system into your internal dashboards via API. 

Another amazingly easy task is finding particular recipients. We have a recipient search widget directly on the dashboard so your Support team can get answers fast. Customer service win! 

Auto-generated, Specific Guidance 

Once you’ve clicked into your StreamScore, you can then get individual scores for each of those four reputation-impacting categories we mentioned a bit earlier. Using our advanced data set, we can identify what is causing a problem and provide advice to help you eliminate the issue at the root with Guided Insights. 

This is automatically generated for you, too, so you can start using these suggested techniques or practices immediately without having to wait for a custom answer from a support team. In fact, lots of ESPs don’t have a dedicated email expert team available to you, so this is a great way to stay in tune with best practices and get help when you need it. 

Direct Mailbox Provider Data 

Back to StreamScore: Those data points we use include those from mailbox providers (MBPs), like direct complaint feedback loop information and data feeds including Google Postmaster Tools and Microsoft SNDS. That means you’re getting contextual data right in your dashboard.  

Not only do we get MBP data, we specify which MBP is related to any problems you might have. Noticing a spike in hard bounces? Our reporting tool can tell you at which MBP you’re having bounce issues. You won’t need to manually sift through the data to find patterns or clues about where this is happening. 

Then, our complaints report allows you to drill down on the MBPs you’re receiving the most FBL complaints from, not just the top five from across the globe. Granularity for the win. 

Connectors 

It’s simple for users of SendGrid to use our connector. Once you’ve set up your SocketLabs account, just create a webhook in their platform, plug in the details into your account with us, and boom, access to SocketLabs Spotlight granted. Our next connectors will be Sinch Mailgun, MessageBird, and Amazon SES. 

Lightning-fast Processing Powered by Snowflake®  

Heard of Snowflake®? Well, if you haven’t, it’s a technology we use to power SocketLabs Spotlight, and it means our users get lightning-fast processing speeds so you can stop waiting and start analyzing in a flash. 

Plus, processing your data won’t break anything. If you’re a lucky one, you won’t know the pain of watching a report-pull set your email world on fire with a dreaded timeout, but we know how many unlucky ones are out there, and we feel your pain. 

Using Snowflake allows us to call for your data rapidly, get it into your dashboard, and open your world to larger data sets efficiently, effectively, and securely, without the fear of everything going “boom.” 

The Cherries on Top 

Beyond the features our reporting product offers SendGrid customers today, we provide a few really nice perks. 

Revamped Subaccount Structure and Highly-controlled User Permissions 

Are you an enterprise sender or a sender with complexity? Well, managing multiple mail streams, product lines, business units, brands, or customers no longer requires you to hop in and out of accounts like you’re doing the Hokey Pokey. Turn yourself right around and use SocketLabs Spotlight instead, where you can manage from above or get on down to the sender-level. If you send with SocketLabs, we even have Rule Engine available, where you can create automated rule sets to help you proactively manage those mail streams to anticipate and prevent issues, rather than diving into the chaos of fire-fighting after the things go up in smoke. 

With a complex or large organization, email can become quite an ordeal with lots of cooks in the kitchen. Using our advanced user permission capabilities, you can give only the right people the right access for the right tasks. Don’t worry about marketing accidentally wandering into billing, or billing bumping into important settings.  

No Need to Migrate 

It can be frustrating to see tools you want to use but knowing you can’t use them because you don’t want to migrate entire systems. That’s why we allow you to get all the benefits of SocketLabs’ revamped, powerful, and best-in-class reporting platform without needing to migrate ESPs. 

Now, of course we would love for you to migrate to us, but we know it can be a big decision because we also know it isn’t the easiest thing in the world. So, sending mail through our platform is just not required anymore. 

Affordable Pricing Model 

It’s also frustrating when you are shoehorned into one or two plan options with very specific limitations. If you choose to also send via SocketLabs, our volume-based pricing structure lets you send what you need at a cost comparable to what you use. Don’t pay the same price as a user sending twice as much volume as you. Make it make sense. 

Need a longer or shorter contract than what might be considered “standard?” We’re always open to collaboration to find what works for you. 

No Volume Restrictions 

SendGrid’s reporting features are inaccessible to certain high-volume senders. (Tip: Scroll down to check out what those asterisks mean for you as a sender.)  

So, not only do we price reasonably based on volume, we don’t restrict reporting features based on volume.  

Human Support 

This is a little shower of rainbow sprinkles on your ice cream sundae, because not only is it a cherry on top of SocketLabs Spotlight, it’s a big feature of SocketLabs as a whole. We have multiple ways to work with our experts: via support tickets, monthly Customer Office Hours, monthly virtual Roundtables, and industry-relevant content like blogs and live webinars on hot topics. 

We won’t leave you waiting for days to receive attention. Plus, our team is full of real, live email experts with combined decades of experience in the email industry proper, not just in SaaS or other “techy” fields. 

This is all part of the partnership. Good service from great people without an extra price tag. 

If you’re interested in more personalized care from experts to help with improving performance based on your specific business needs, we also have consultation packages available to add to our highly regarded support team. 

Turn on the Spotlight 

SocketLabs Spotlight is chock full o’ features and is so easy to use. Not only that, it’s simple to get started. Ready to illuminate every aspect of your email performance, even those little shadowy corners? We’ll guide you to the light!