Sendwithus launches GDPR-compliant, cloud-based email CMS

Sendwithus announced on Tuesday the launch of Dyspatch, an enterprise-level, cloud-based and GDPR-compliant email content management system (CMS) for transactional emails.

Dyspatch is a CMS platform for email that manages workflow, including building, editing and commenting from a variety of stakeholders. When the email is ready to be deployed, it is “exposed via our API,” Matt Harris, co-founder and chief executive officer of Sendwithus, told me. “And then the customer integrates with the API. So we’re not actually involved in the sending of the email, we’re a content management layer.”

Harris said that enterprises have historically had problems managing system-triggered transactional emails, which pose different challenges for enterprises than for smaller organizations.

“Marketing-cloud-style products are not built for data-driven triggered email,” Harris said. “It’s hard to get data into the emails, and they’re working with an email template system designed for marketing emails, not transactional.”

He explained further:

… [M]arketing-cloud products aren’t designed with modular email components in mind. It’s difficult or impossible, which makes updating a single logo difficult, because the effort needs to be duplicated across all email templates. … [T]ransactional email is always tied to a product feature. Due to this, there’s a certain need for control of when an email can change, as well as some integration into the development/product lifecycle.

We want to be tightly ingrained in all of the back-end systems that a company uses and surface all of these really valuable emails to the people in the company that care about the customer most — people on the marketing team, those in charge of customer experience.

GDPR out of the box

Because Dyspatch does not collect personal information, it is “GDPR-compliant out of the box,” Harris said, referring to the upcoming General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) that grants European citizens sweeping rights to their data.

“We actually go quite a few steps further than [GDPR],” Harris said. “We’ve designed it to work with some of the world’s largest and most customer-sensitive companies in the world. The API actually can’t catch customer data. There’s no way to put a customer email address or any other PII (personally identifiable information) inside of the Dyspatch system.”