August 2024 Summaries

Today marks the end of Resend Forward, a third launch week for new features from the company. In the last seven days, six new features were shipped, including a new API to schedule emails at a specific time without additional complexity, a new integration with Vercel that allows direct management of API keys and environment variables in Vercel projects, a new view for marketing users to understand how their emails deliver, Marketing Analytics to track engagement and opt-out rates, Deliverability Insights to improve email landing in the inbox, and a new major version of react.email with improved performance and pre-built components. These features are available on resend.com/blog/introducing-the-schedule-email-api, resend.com/blog/vercel-integration, resend.com/blog/introducing-marketing-analytics, resend.com/blog/deliverability-insights, resend.com/blog/react-email-3, and resend.com/blog/broadcast-schedule.

The ability to schedule broadcasts has been introduced by the platform, allowing users to send emails at a later time using natural language inputs such as "in 1 hour" or "tomorrow at 9am ET". The scheduling range is more flexible compared to the individual email scheduling feature. Users can update scheduled broadcasts by navigating to the specific broadcast and selecting from options to update the time, content, or both. This new feature is available on the Broadcasts page and users can start scheduling broadcasts immediately.

React Email 3.0 has been released with a faster development experience, featuring a collection of pre-built components that can be used to create beautiful emails. The new version includes 54 components across various categories, making it easier for developers to build elegant UIs. React Email now boasts improved performance, with startup times reduced by massive amounts compared to the previous version. The new release also addresses compatibility issues with upcoming React versions and introduces a new `render` function that is async by default. Additionally, Supabase has released an email hook feature that allows users to customize their authentication emails using React Email templates.

Improve email deliverability by identifying issues and applying best practices is a goal of Deliverability Insights, an internal tool developed to help companies improve their email deliverability. The tool is now being made available as a built-in feature in Resend now, allowing users to check their emails for best practices and optimize their deliverability. The insights are broken down into three categories: alignment with industry best practices, optimizations that could improve deliverability, and recommendations to further enhance deliverability. Deliverability Insights are currently available for free to all plans during the Beta phase, with plans to add more insights in the future.

We are unveiling Marketing Analytics, giving you both aggregated metrics along with itemized breakdowns of how your broadcasts performed. When sending to a large audience, it can take a lot of work to know how your broadcast performed or how to improve it. Marketing Analytics gives you clear metrics to understand how your emails deliver, engage, and where users opt-out. Keeping delivery rates high is essential to maintaining your reputation as a sender because inbox providers use them to indicate the quality of your list. For the delivered messages, you want to know how your audience interacted with the email. We use open and click rates to give a window into the engagement. There are times when users signal that they don't want to hear from you anymore. Two main indications of this are complaints and unsubscribes. Marketing Analytics provides drill-downs into Opens, Unsubscribes, Bounces, and Complaints. It also helps you understand what your audience is interested in by analyzing the performance of multiple links in your email.

Connect your Resend API keys with Vercel environment variables in just a few clicks, thanks to the new integration announced by Resend. This integration allows you to automatically create and add a new API key linked to the domain of your choice as an environment variable in your Vercel project. To get started, simply head over to the Resend Integration page and follow the steps, selecting your Vercel team and choosing either a specific project or all projects in your account. The integration does all the heavy lifting for you, so you can focus on building amazing projects without worrying about misconfigurations or tedious tasks like manually creating and copying API keys. Additionally, Resend has released a new Vercel template that includes a pre-configured Next.js project with a real React Email template, complete with an already set up Resend API key as an environment variable.

Send emails at a specific time without additional complexity. While some emails need to be delivered immediately, others can be scheduled for a specific time. This new Resend API allows you to schedule emails using the various Resend SDKs, and once scheduled, you can see the scheduled time in the Resend dashboard. You can update or reschedule an email directly in the dashboard, cancel a scheduled email with code or through the dashboard, and check the Resend OpenAPI spec for more details on parameters and limitations. The new endpoint aims to simplify scheduling emails without introducing additional complexity.