VSH solutions designed and developed an advanced SaaS-based product from scratch to provide a complete sales and marketing automation tool with a number of industry-first features.

Mailtag is an Enterprise Sales and Marketing Software which was initially developed as an email tracking solution and in a later phase was improved to be a cutting edge SaaS based automation product. The application allows users to track their email in real time and facilitates the sales and marketing process with a unique approach to reach out to its audience. Primary features of the product includes real time email tracking, link click tracking, email scheduling, automated follow-ups, real time notifications and analytics. The scope of this project included development of:

• SaaS based Web Application
• Browser Extension

The client is a serial entrepreneur based in the United States and post exit from their successful venture, they came up with an idea to fill the void in the sales and marketing vertical with an innovative product. Client wanted to engineer an integrated SaaS product to manage and automate the comprehensive activities in the domain with industry-first features and processes. Client’s Technical team was looking for an organization with experience of working with international clientele and competency to develop end to end products in an economically viable way.

Contemplating VSH’s experience and technological competency, VSH was chosen to be the technology partner for Mailtag.

The project was initiated with the extensive market research to understand the pain points of the target audience and include functionalities to address those. Product architecture was developed from scratch to support the vast number of complex functionalities and projected continuous upgrades which proved to be the advantageous in the later phases of development

The development of the MAILTAG had three important attributes:

In order to check the viability of the product functionalities and align the improvements with user surveys, the product was developed in three different Versions:

Version One (V1)

Based on the market research in the initial phase, only the core features of the product were developed in the version one. Post the deployment of the V1, MAILTAG managed to onboard around 7,000 users.

Version Two (V2)

Based on the user surveys of and feedback received from V1 users, new features were added in V2 along with changes in the designs to improve the user experience.

Improvements in the V2 include:

• Addition of new features like email scheduling and auto follow-ups to reinforce the existing features
• From a user point of view, bottlenecks were identified in the designs and workflows and considered various factors like color, font, look and feel, a number of activities to be performed etc. to improve the overall usability of
  the product
• Development of tools to aid the marketing efforts and implement the user retention policy by adding the coupon system and ability to provide custom plans around features and their pricing
• In order to reduce the cart abandoning, development of a separate system to retarget such users and provide them with offers relevant to their usage

Version Three (V3)

Developments in the V2 resulted into more than 20,000 users but we came across many performance issues due to addition of heavy functionalities.

V3 development includes:

• Patching of all the bugs and performance issues on a regular basis
• Development of minor features in order to increase the value propositions by improving the usability and optimizing user onboarding
• Based on the user data and behavior patterns of more than 20,000 users, the MAILTAG management decided to do some strategic changes in the business model. In the beginning, there were two versions of the product: Free version and Paid Version. As a part of this strategic decision, the free version of this product was discontinued and all the free version users were migrated to a free trial of paid version for two weeks. New users were also given direct access to this version to understand the scope and potential of the product.
• Along with these major changes, there were continuous improvements on UI and features front to offer the best possible experience to MAILTAG users

The development of the MAILTAG propels it ahead of any of its counterparts and fulfills the objective of its founders to provide the futuristic solution in Sales and Marketing domain.

Due to the time difference of almost 11 hours, it was difficult to have real-time communication between the MAILTAG Stakeholders and the development team. To cater to this challenge, VSH management adjusted the working hours of the concerned team by a couple of hours and created a time overlap for efficient real-time communication.

Gmail is an underlying platform for the MAILTAG browser extension and during Version Three, all of a sudden Gmail UI was changed. VSH team reacted quickly to this and revamped the product to support old as well new UI of the Gmail. All of this was done in a period of 7 working days.

In addition to the major milestones of the project, there were continuous improvements in UI and product features which used to account for 2 to 3 daily deployments. Despite these, all the major milestones were completed on time
without any problem.

Subtle improvements like button size, button colour, and user friendly UI etc. can have deep impact on improving the user experience

Tasks engagement and ownership of the resources are critical in project planning

Resources with consistent skillsets are key to increase the execution efficiency of the project

Application of lessons learned from the previous scenarios is important to manage challenges and mitigate the risks

It is very Important to have a risk mitigation plan for every aspect of the project for successful completion of the project without delays

• Precise execution of the business strategies, advanced features, engaging UI has transformed MAILTAG to be most sophisticated tool in the Sales and Marketing vertical.
• Reduced cart abandoning rate by 55%
• More than 300% of revenue growth was achieved post the launch of latest third version of MAILTAG