Finally figured out a perfect marketing and transactional email setup

Tips
1

Hi everyone! I’ve posted here a couple of times over the past 6 months of building my app asking for tips on how to set up an affordable and easy-to-use email sender. I finally got this working perfectly for my site and wanted to share what worked for me here.

Here’s my stack:

I chose Postmark because SendGrid support was incredibly frustrating to work with when I was trying to get approved to send emails. And because I heard good things about Postmark’s delivery rates from people on this forum. I also liked being able to start with 10,000 emails/month for $15 and being able to scale from there. Right from the start, it’s just worked.

I have no HTML skills, so I spent a lot of time hunting around for a tool for designing my emails. Designmodo’s postcards tool has checked all the boxes and I’m extremely glad to have found this service. Online image hosting and 5 exports per month are free so I’ve had no reason to have to upgrade my account so far. I design my emails here and then export them as HTML that I copy and paste into the Postmark template builder.

Finally, I send out emails to those users who have signed up for my newsletter using the Postmark Template Plugin built by Lindsay. I opted to shell out $36 for this plugin to save time with the setup and make it easy for me to send emails. Now all I do is update the template alias in the plugin and then click a button in my admin dashboard. The plugin then sends out emails in batches of 500, saving on WUs.

Here are the workflows behind this:

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A huge shoutout to @lindsay_knowcode for this plugin.

Having the setup I describe here working on my site has been a huge relief and success for my app. I wouldn’t have thought it could be this complicated to build a robust emailing setup, which is why I wanted to share my experience of what worked for me. Happy to try to answer any questions.

-Mateo

6 Likes
2

Oh wow you just made my weekend. Thank you :blue_heart: :blue_heart: :blue_heart: :blue_heart:

If you are ever in London I invite you for a beer or coffee. :slightly_smiling_face:

1 Like
5

Thank you for your work!

6

Maybe a better way to send massive emails is using “Email Campaings”. What is the reason to send emails one by one via your api workflow?

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Could you clarify what you mean? I set up the api workflow because batch emails are limited to 500 emails per batch.

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Hey @mateod.kaiser
You can do it using one single api workflow and setting up your email campaign (email campaign = email to sent to a multiple users in one time) more info here: Sending your bulk and promotional email with Postmark, explained | Postmark

also in Brevo is super easy to setup email campaigns: https://help.brevo.com/hc/en-us/articles/4413566705298-Create-an-email-campaign

9

Thanks! I like brevo but didn’t want the added costs for this project.

10

Have you tried Mailchimp?

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@mateod.kaiser we are working on a new email marketing platform that also allows you to send transactional email. We want to focus on providing 20% features that 80% of the users use and in return have a low price point.

Do you mind sharing what features you look for and therefore should be in our platform in order to be of interest for you? And also let me know what you would be willing to pay.

Same holds for others. The more data the better for all of us.

Why we build it ourselves?

  • hate pricing on volume of customers and email sending at the same time
  • Hate the technical split between marketing and transactional email
  • Hate to design email templates, this should be automated using our existing brand and web design
  • Poor multi language handling
  • Confusing UX/UI
  • Poor handling of multiple accounts and domains on the same plan (yes I get it, they want to earn more but we would like to empower solopreneurs as well who have often multiple side hustles
  • Easy integration with external systems via simple API. With Bubble for instance. Plus descriptive error text and proper error codes via api
12

Yep but found it too costly for this project since I’d still be paying for transactional emails.

13

HI if you all interested can try this plug in call Super-Send-Email Plugin | Bubble

It enable you to sent email from your own SMTP server so you do not need to pay extra for each email.

Cheer.

14

To be honest, I wish I had a service like postmark, at the same price point, with a drag and drop template creator. Thats it :slight_smile:

15

@mateod.kaiser I have put you on our list. What you want is what we want and I think 80% of users want.

One difference is that we are now working on a solution where you have a central place where you store your brand identity like brand name, brand logo’s, brand colors, brand fonts, brand mission, brand vision, offered services and products etc

This will then be used for design fully automated by AI. So your emails are automatically fully styled according to your brand. After which you can always tweak if you like but we don’t like to so we are testing how we can get there.

As soon as we have something you can try I will let you know!

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Sounds good!

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Yes it does! Also great fun building it. We have launched many companies and it is always a lot of work to get things up and running in a good way.

Need a website…need a landing page, need email marketing, need transactional email, need social media posts, need ads etc etc. Before you know it you have to learn lots of tools and in all of them you do the same. Thing. Every. Single. Time. Add brand, add logo, add address, add email, etc etc etc

So we try to setup everything with a push of a button so to speak.

Lots of interest so we are keeping a list in the background for people interested