Sendy, a Singapore startup looking to redistribute value in email marketing, aims to solve an ever-growing problem for email marketers: getting customers to engage with their email marketing campaigns. As a digital marketing channel, email still delivers the highest ROI for marketers, but a consistent decline in engagement rates over the last decade suggests a deeper issue at work.
Email readers are bombarded by a combination of poor quality and irrelevant content daily. Their low levels of interaction with these emails very quickly trigger spam filters on many email internet service providers (ISPs), resulting in lower inbox deliverability rates and progressively poorer engagement levels.
In fact, Statista found as much as 50% of total emails sent worldwide in March 2018 were spam.
In order to improve engagement, Sendy is building an open API that enables marketers on any email platform to improve their engagement rates by attaching a reward pool of digital tokens with their email campaigns. By simply engaging with these emails, users can claim their stake and be rewarded in Sendy’s token for their attention.
“Having worked in email for six years, we’ve seen how legitimate marketers are progressively finding it harder to get in front of their customers. With Sendy, we have the opportunity to add real value to email and deliver results for marketers by helping them stand out of the crowd,” said co-founder George Hartley.
To minimize any friction in adopting digital currency within their network, users on Sendy are able to receive tokens with no effort on their behalf. After accumulating tokens, they will be able to use their tokens within the Sendy ecosystem to access loyalty programs with marketers, exchange them for other virtual currencies or even donate them to charitable causes.
“We are aiming to create value for both email subscribers and marketers by building a token economy that encourages quality content delivery and meaningful customer engagement. With every product, the experience layer must remain friendly to the everyday user and that is what we have done with our blockchain implementation,” Hartley added.
Sendy is being developed by the same team that founded email startups Sendicate and SmartrMail. Sendicate launched in 2012, while SmartrMail was spun out in late 2016. Having raised a $500K AUD seed round through the Sydney Angels and having gone through the reputable Startmate Accelerator backed by Blackbird Ventures in 2017 – the combined teams have scaled up to 14 staff across Singapore, Australia, Europe, and the US. Sendicate and SmartrMail collectively serve 7000 active users, sending over 1 billion emails per year to 72 million email subscribers. Both platforms will be integrated with Sendy, giving the project immediate scale at launch.
Sendy is in the process of raising a total of $19 million USD through its initial coin offering, having closed a seed round of $500K USD backed by both Techemy Capital and Apollo Capital – the premier crypto funds in New Zealand and Australia.
Further information on the Sendy project, including the white paper, can be found at sendy.network.
