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.
Related
Several vendors (SendGrid, MailChimp, SendInBlue) have "transactional" emails (sent via an external program relayed through the vendor) and "marketing" emails (managed in the vendor app through HTML templates). The vendors also have unsubscribe management and build up lists of people who have unsubscribed.
How do you use the unsubscribe information in the transactional mail side? If you try to send to X and they've unsubscribed, does it just drop the email sent to X? If not, do you have to check unsubscribe information in your own app before generating a transactional email?
What are best practices in managing this subscribe information across transactional and marketing applications? I have been searching the web, and I just find guides on how to set up the unsubscribe links (sendgrid, mailchimp, sendinblue) , but not how to use the information properly on the transactional side.
For SendGrid, if someone clicks on a global unsubscribe link, then future sends through the SendGrid transactional email API will drop it. You can see the Drop in the "Activity Feed" after the unsubscribe:
The unsubscribe list can be edited manually (to either add or delete names) through a web UI or an API.
There are also unsubscribe groups if you don't want one global unsubscribe list.
I still don't know the easiest way to integrate two systems, though. Presumably a scheduled job to copy from one system to another.
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.
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.
I have a large user list which is distributed in two groups. 1. Phplist 2. Vbulletin
Phplist has around 50,000 users while vbulletin has some 70,000 users. These all are double optin safe lists and completely legal.
We have a dedicated server and use phplist tos end mails but a single mails takes 3 days to process given phplist limitations. I am very keen to use Sendgrid / Amazaon SES or something so that i can shoot pur monthly newsletters much faster ( we have some 20 news letters including jobs, announcements login etc).
At present we send emailes from a different domain than the main one and its like www.mydomainnewsletter.com while main site and corporate emails are www.mydomain.com ( my main site is on drupal)
Now how do I build a process where all transaction and corporate mails go from mydomain.com while all newsletters go from mydomainnewsletters.com. users shall subscribe and unsubscribe at mydomain.com and this email list shall be synchronized with www.mydomainnewsletter.com.
My server has qmail intalled. So can somebody guide me through the process. I am not techie at all.
You have a few options, that I can think of. I definitely don't think you should do this in-house unless you want to deal with the huge mess of dealing with deliverability.
Here are some non-in-house options:
Build a scheduler, server side, to shoot out the emails to third party providers like SendGrid and Amazon SES, or make bulk email API calls using PostageApp
Use a service built for newsletters, like MailChimp, which can manage your lists for you and send out bulk emails without any problems whatsoever.
At least with these services, you're looking at a much faster delivery time. (Three days is attrocious.) They have the resources to send these emails, they worry about the deliverability, and you can focus on making an awesome newsletter and/or working on your website.
Full Disclosure: I am the Product Manager of PostageApp.