Setting up recurring emails

[josh7]

Hi guys,

I’m looking at setting up a weekly “job alert” email in my app which would email users once a week with a personalised list of links based on each user’s job preferences. I’ve read some forum posts on how to do this and it seems quite complex but I’m wondering if anybody has any advice on the best way to approach this? Specifically, I’m wondering if it’s better to do this with Bubble scheduled workflows or Zapier and what the benefits of each would be?

thanks

JT

[romanmg]

Hi Josh, if your app is on the Professional plan, then you can run weekly recurring events. This would be set up in the API Workflows area.

Check out this video for enabling API Workflows: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RbQCCZfdzes

The way it works is a recurring event needs to be attached to some Thing in your database; in your case, the Thing would be a User. The event works just like a regular workflow event. So, every time this event runs, it’ll trigger the workflow. Here, you can add “Send Email” and customize it with whatever dynamic information is related to the “Current Workflow’s User.”

To set a recurring a event, you’ll need to trigger the “Set Recurring Event” action. If this is something all of your users will get, then a great place to trigger the action is upon sign up or in a user settings screen where they can enable these weekly updates. The action lets you define the Thing (i.e. Current User) and the frequency (i.e. weekly). Once set, Bubble will automatically run this workflow every week for you.

To cancel, you trigger the same “Set/Cancel Recurring Event” action for a user but set the frequency to “None.”

Hope this helps you get started. There are other ways to do this too (yes with Zapier, and also with a recursive API Workflow), but I think this is the most straight-forward method you can go with since it’s a popular use case for the Recurring Event feature.

A benefit of other methods off the top of my head would be to avoid a higher Bubble plan. Though Zapier is also a paid system depending on your volume of zaps.

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[simon]

I use zapier to everyday hit a bubble api endpoint and run a workflow. Then in that workflow I have all my daily, weekly and monthly emails. You just set each email to only run when current day is Monday or 30th of the month or similar.

But there are lots of way to do this. The challenge with the bubble pricing is for the one feature of running reoccurring workflows it is not cost effective to upgrade just for that so cheaper to use zapier for free or even there paid for service.

Simon