Multivariant email in Dynamics CRM - email

Does anybody have resources on multivariant email testing in Dynamics CRM?
Multivariant email being where an organization wants to segment their contacts and send separant variations of an email campaign to different segments in their organization?

You should create a marketing campaign and segment the people out by Marketing Lists. Then create specific campaign activities for each marketing list that is added to the campaign.

Like Focus is saying Marketing Campaign is the solution.
If you want resources on the Marketing portion of CRM take a look at
http://www.redware.com/mscrm/ms_crm_handbook/microsoft_crm_marketing.html
It contains all explainations on how to create and distribute email campaigns.

Related

Can I use Sendgrid e-mail API plan to self manage my mailing list?

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.

Mass email inbox creation API

I am reaching out to the community for a help. One of the public facing website we are developing, will take an anticipated load of 2 million emails per peak hour. In order to perform load testing, I was looking to utilize API calls to create email inboxes.
I have came across some email providers like MailSlurp or Mailinator where we can use email inboxes but do you know if there are any additional providers where we can create that volume of email inboxes? Our company has security concerns on both MailSlurp and Mailinator. Preferably free of cost but with cost will also work.

E-Mail tool for Transactional, Automated and Newsletter E-Mails

I’m looking for a E-Mail tool to fit my needs. Right now we use Mandrill for transactional E-Mails and Mailchimp for Newsletters. We would love to cover the Automated E-Mails also with Mailchimp, but the tools are quite limited (see our requirements in 2.).
My gut feeling says, there is no [single] tool to cover my needs, but before I spend months developing a stable tool which handles all of my needs, I thought I would reach out to you.
Here are my needs:
Transactional E-Mails:
We want to use it to send transactional emails. Depending on [the category of] what the customer bought, the context of the email will be different (e.g. other images, texts). There will be up to 20 different categories.
Automated E-Mails:
We want to send an E-Mail to a customer for his birthday or before an ordered product arrives. As our products usually take between 1 month and 1 year to deliver, we also want to send an E-Mail, enriched with detailed information about the product, 1 month and also 1 day in prior. Now the important part: Some customers have up to 3 outstanding deliveries per year.
In a perfect world, all this timings and the templates can be edited by our marketing personnel, not just by a developer.
Newsletter E-Mails:
Each customer and/or customer group should become a personalised newsletter. Therefor the newsletter tool has to be fed with data about the customer from our systems/Salesforce.
All customer specific data is in Salesforce. Therefor the ideal mail system has a good Salesforce integration.
Do you know of any product[s] like this? What would you use?
Thank you!
At Stack Overflow, our needs are similar. We send a bunch of triggered transactional emails, automated "drip" emails, and digest newsletters. Until recently, we sent everything through our own codebase using homegrown tools, but we're in the process of transitioning over to SendGrid. We also looked at Mail Gun and Send With Us, but SendGrid seemed like the best fit and we hope to send everything through one ESP.
We don't use Salesforce, so I can't comment on that.

Whats the difference between emails through hosting servers and mailchimp/mandrill?

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.

Send emails through Mailchimp, but select recipients with queries from my database

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.