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How do you approach sending marketing or update emails to your users?
Scenario: you have <app> with 500 users registered user. You have their emails in your <app> database, as they used that when they signed up for your <app>.
You want to send out some marketing stuff and plan on doing it every once in a while.
Do you:
1) query your own database and manually write a script to send out emails, using an API like Sendgrid, SES, etc.
2) periodically import emails into something like Mailchimp etc and just send from there?
3) some other magic?
You want to send out some marketing stuff and plan on doing it every once in a while.
Do you:
1) query your own database and manually write a script to send out emails, using an API like Sendgrid, SES, etc.
2) periodically import emails into something like Mailchimp etc and just send from there?
3) some other magic?
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I start Thundercontent 1 month ago. Since the beginning, I export from Stripe Customers email and import to Emailoctopus (Mailchimp-like).
It works when you have 2-5 customers / day (100 in total). but it is repetitive chores.
Then I send all my email marketing with Emailoctopus.
My password recovery, welcome and login emails are sent with Sendgrid API.
In the next few days, I want to automate the process by adding email to Sendgrid. from my Database → Sendgrid.
And manage and send ALL my emails from Sendgrid.
Currently, I need to find out a little more about how to do it with Sendgrid.
Thank you Ronald for asking the question, I'm very interested in the answer of others 👇
Did you take your consent for sending marketing emails? Probably not. Something to keep in mind. Most will tolerate it, if you are providing value.
That being said, send regular text-emails and not market-y emails from the system you have in place. Query all email addresses and sending email in a loop ain't too much work. If you have a lot of customers, do that in batches.
I've taken two different approaches in the past.
I've used Intercom, which makes sending these types of emails super easy. It works really well for that. The downside is that it can become quite costly. I think they price based on number of users, so it really depends on how valuable each user is for you. If you've got a ton of non-paying users, then it might not be for you. On the other hand, if you're selling $99/mo SaaS subscriptions then it will be worth the money.
The other approach I've taken is adding the marketing emails as part of my Rails app and use the existing code to send emails. It's cheap, but it does require some coding anytime you want to send an email. I'm probably sending less email then I should as a result of this.
When writing your own script you also want to be really careful not to mess it up. It's easy to accidentally send the same email multiple times, etc. I speak from experience 😅
I just sent out a waitlist to our email today!
Here are the things I prioritize:
That's about it!
We collect waitlist signups in Webflow.
I have a Google Sheet with all the emails.
I add the emails from the last seven days of sign ups to the sheet.
I remove any unsubscribes (collected from Google Form).
I write my update in Notion (formatting copy and pastes perfectly into Gmail)
I email through gmail in bcc
--
Per other people here - I like this approach because it's lightweight and fairly error proof. I'm not dependent on another system.
HOWEVER....my unsubscribe & email management process is broken. Watching this thread for other solutions.
Hope this helps!
Quick update to my post! I thiiiiiiink this approach (mass emailing bcc w/ janky unsubscribed linked) can get your emails marked as spam....
I'm not positive but wanted to close the loop here!