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:
- Postmark for sending transactional and broadcast emails
- Designmodo for easily creating free and beautiful HTML marketing emails
- Postmark Template Plugin for sending broadcast emails to my subscribers
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:
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
