How do you manage email templates across email providers for your SaaS?
Most of the SaaS I build is sending out two types of emails:
- transactional emails using service like Postmark
- marketing emails using services like Mailchimp or Activecampaign
In the case of marketing emails, I use the automatization features the services provide intensively.
I'm interested in how would you solve the following problems I faced:
- Manage email templates and content across services: I store, for example, Postmark templates in postmark and Mailchimp templates MC. Keeping the two systems consistent is painful. Recently we started using CMS like Contentful for manage all kinds of content on the SaaS. It seems natural that the content for emails sent out with MC should come from CMS. But how would you effectively implement keep system consistent?
- Automatize the workflow/automation creation in eg.: Mailchimp: I did not find API endpoints that allow you to create automation in any of the services I looked. Did I miss something? Do you know any email marketing service that provide such functionality? Do you use the automatization feature of these services, or you implemented your email workflows in your backend? (The lack of this feature one of the remaining reason for example why I cannot fully automatize deployment or testing)
- Consolidated reporting and analytics from these systems? Did you build your own? Do you use some tools?
I sovled a similar problem by keeping the templates as HTML in my repository and writing a script to update them on the API. I use SES and Mailgun which both have fairly similar API endpoints though so it's not too difficult to post the template changes. I've also done this with Sparkpost in the past which again, has a very similar endpoint you can just POST to in a build script (triggered by a template change in git).
Can't help with Mailchimp specifically though soz
Thanks. This is indeed one possible solution for the template management question. Did you use the same setup for marketing automatization as well?
Yes but my marketing is much more primitive and more of a personalised mail-merge thing so I don't use all the marketing campaign features you probably need