How do you sync your SAAS DB's user info with your e-mail marketing?
Hi all,
I launched VidHug (https://vidhug.com) this summer and while it's gone about as slow as expected, I'm seeing some encouraging signs of growth. At the same time, I continue plugging away on the highest priority, which is marketing (which I am essentially learning from scratch!).
One of the many things I don't do yet (so many things to do, so little time) is e-mail marketing. Of any kind. Even to my existing users that have signed up. That probably seems like a good place to start. However, it's not entirely obvious to me how people keep their e-mail marketing software (be it MailChimp, Drip, etc.) e-mail list synchronized with their SAAS app's database of users. I'm assuming it's not a manual process.
In my particular situation, the user sign-up and authentication is handled via AWS Cognito, so all my users are stored in a "user pool" there and that's where their e-mail addresses are.
I'm wondering what others have done to hook these two things up. I'd love to not only synchronize the names and e-mail addresses, but also market differently to users based on their usage patterns within the product.
Wow, this question is so valuable to me!
I'm working on SaaS boilerplate and it would be great to implement some sort of seamless integration with some of email marketing services.
Thanks for the idea!
As for your question - I think it can be done using their API (I believe they should have some). So technically you somehow segment your users (setting some flags for example) and then add to the specific list of mail service. But the task doesn't look a piece of cake - the concept is simple but not easy. For example you need to have some hooks on any user info changes - to synchronize with the mail service and many other small but important things.
Thank you and I'm glad the question is useful to you as well!
Yes, this sounds reasonable.
I totally agree - this is one of those things that may seem simple but will probably end up taking several days to get up and running and then to deal with the inevitable bugs. It's an unforgiving area too, since mistakes could hurt my sender reputation.
Sounds like a pain point and a SAAS opportunity!
I've set up a simple automation in Woopra based on events that my app is pushing to the tool:
app installed ➡️ add user to a list in MailChimp
app uninstalled ➡️ remove user from the list in MailChimp
To be honest, I haven't sent any email campaign yet. I'd need to segment the users to send right emails to the right people. It would be possible to set up a fined tuned segmentation in Woopra, but unfortunately it's a Pro feature now and the subscription costs $999/month...
Iinitially I would just provide webhooks and then build a connector for zapier and push people to use zapier to connect to whatever system they use. That way you don't have to support every system out there.
If you want to get more advanced, Zapier has a partner program where you can build that functionality into your product to make it more seamless.
All email marketing platforms out there come with public API's which you can use for pretty much anything.
What email platform are you using? For example, say yousing MailChimp, you can use webhooks to connect AWS Cognito to commect with MailChimp. Could also go the route of something like Zapier to connect to various systems.