The Short of it:
Can I self-manage my own mass e-mail marketing through the SendGrid "Email API Plan"? Or do I have to set up a "Marketing campaign plan" even if I want to build out my own marketing campaign app.
More details if needed:
I noticed that a marketing campaign plan for 50k emails a month is like $60, while an email API plan is like $20 for 50k emails. If possible, id much rather create my own app and send out mass emails for my newsletter and marketing using the email API because it's cheaper (and also seems like it would result in much more control over personalization and such).
However, the documentation they provide makes it really unclear to me if this is allowed or not. It says you can use the build-in SendGrid marketing campaign tools OR build your own app using the API, but both "Email API plans" and "Marketing campaign plans" have API it seems, so I'm not 100% sure what they mean by this.
Any help is much appreciated.
You can do that, it's certainly possible to send mass emails using the Email API if you want to handle the list side of it yourself. Just note that the maximum number of emails you can send in a single request is 1,000, but if you were sending an email to a list handled by SendGrid, you could make a single API call to handle that.
To address some of your other points, I don't believe there's any difference in the personalisation available to you between the Email API and the Marketing Campaigns plans. The only difference when sending is that Marketing Campaigns use a template always, whereas regular Email API sends can provide the full text/HTML they want to use in the API request. But you can always create the template ahead of time with that HTML for a campaign.
The Marketing Campaigns product has an API that you can use to manage campaigns. That API is not available if you only have an Email API plan.
Related
If company already subscribed to MailChimp do they need also Mandril to send transactional emails such as app welcome, invites to join or befriend, password recovery etc.
Can one send password recovery or welcome email as one person campaign programmatically using MailChimp alone? Or is it too expensive or too cumbersome?
I've been using Mailchimp for a while and what you are seeking can be partially managed with a featured called automation within Mailchimp. It allows you to:
Set up any number of emails as chained emails (so to say) which are triggered individually when something happens within the Mailchimp list. For example if someone joins your list, it triggers a welcome message. This automation requires in some cases no code and can be done relatively easy. You can see more automation examples here (of course you can use their API for more cool stuff).
For password changes notifications, email verifications and such transactional emails you could use Mandrill, but as an add-on within Mailchimp which has a separate pricing, where you can start free for the first 2000 emails.
I believe the automation on Mailchimp + a good use of their API to make changes on the list, could easily be put to good use to your advantage (haven't tried this combination yet but will do in the future, let me know if you find out something).
To answer more directly your question, yes, you can achieve a certain degree of automation with the automation part of Mailchimp (which is relatively new), but for a more granular control you definitely could use Mandrill as an add-on within Mailchimp.
Techically, you could create single person campaigns via the Mailchimp API.
But, Mailchimp has developed it's own anti-spam AI (Omnivore) that kicks in every time the campaign is ready to be sent, which analyzes the campaign and list data.
Since I had Omnivore block some of my campaigns for trivial reasons, I think it would be a matter of time before it finds a pattern in your workaround.
I have a .NET console application that add a list of users in a selected Yammer group through [/group_memberships.json] endpoint and it works fine.
Anyway the customer wants to avoid the sending of a confirmation email to user that has been added. In fact, after my program runs, all users receive an email like "XXX has added you to the YYY group on Yammer. Go to group".
The only way that I found to avoid this email is disable email notification in user settings.
Is there another simple way? Through Rest API is possible tell to Yammer to do not send email or, otherwise, change the user settings? I'm asking it because there're some hidden Rest API not documented in the official Yammer site.
Thanks
Yammer doesn't have any API endpoint to achieve your objective. Your customer may consider adding a rule in exchange to block emails based on the "from" address and certain keywords in the "subject".
Ok i currently send information to my customers through my magento website. I'm curious to know what the difference is between sending emails through my website's server and using a service like mailchimp or mandrill?
Mailchimp has a lot of list management features for the admins such as sub-dividing your list into the most responsive vs least responsive subscribers so you can tailor your message to each (for example), MailChimp has your campaign analytics built into their dashboard, they have fully implemented sign-up buttons for your website, automatically sent subscription confirmation emails, and subscription management forms for the users to decide which lists they want to be on. These are just a few benefits.
Basically:
You could do all that with Magento and Google Analytics and a bunch of custom backend code, but it would be a huuuge amount of work. Then again it all depends on how much you intend on focusing on email marketing. If you're sending a newsletter to a small list, then you're probably fine with sending emails from Magento.
We are looking for an email API service that allows us to send emails to specific users (not just list by list but user-by-user). Usually that would be considered transactional email and you would use an API like Sendgrid or Mandrill for it.
However, we have been using the Mailchimp service so far and we really like its dashboard and what it allows you to do from subscribing users manually, to sorting and searching, etc. We also like how Mailchimp handles unsubscribes, subscription confirmation, and preference updating of subscribers.
is there any API service that combines the two?
SendGrid actually has all of the features that you mentioned in your question. We have a dashboard that will allow you to:
Subscribe users manually
Sort and search through your list of users
Handle unsubscribing
We don't force you to opt people in (subscription confirmation), but that would be super easy to build if you really wanted it.
More details about all of this on our website and in our documentation. You can also contact our support team (which is available 24/7 by phone, email, and chat)
I have a database as part of my web app that stores user emails, age, gender, etc. Is there a way, through the API to send a bulk email to a lsit of users? Previously I've used their API to create new entries from my database in MailChimp's system, and then we'd segment our users through MailChimp's web application. The issue is that sending your data to MailChimp has so many issues. For example, to store a user's age in MailChimp, you have to create an individual "group title" for each age when done thru the API. You can't just specify that the field "age" is a number and then add whatever you like. Also, each user selects a city when they sign up through us, and if we add another city to our selection list, you have to manually add it on MailChimp, otherwise you get an error.
So the simplest solution would be if we could do the segmenting on our side and send an email through the API, unless there is another, easy way to do this. I know that Amazon SES let's you email through an API, but I want other features of MailChimp, such as sent email history, analytics and providing and easy unsubscribe feature for users - Amazon SES doesn't do any of that.
Is there an answer to my conundrum?
Have you checked out Mandrill? It's a newer service from MailChimp that works like SES, but has those incredible MailChimp marketing sensibilities you know and love (open/click tracking, email audit log, plus lots of new stuff.)
It won't connect directly to your data in MailChimp (yet), but it sounds like you've got all the relevant data in your own DB already and can do the segmentation and content generation yourself.
Bonus: you'll also get a discount if you're already a paying MailChimp customer.