How to programmatically generate email newsletters
I've garnered quite a few hundred of interested folks for a topic but it's too tedious to create newsletters every day/week. There's data I can generate programmatically but how do I fit them into a nicely formatted email?
So far from my online search, there doesn't seem to be any nice formatted email template/tool that I can connect with API to create and send totally automated. All the current tools require content to be manually generated and they automate the sending part only.
Does anyone know any such email tool that can support fully automated content generation? My data are all accessible via API.
Thanks!
Mailgun supports this. My newsletter is a mix of auto-generated content (generated using laravel php/blade templates) and hand-written content, but it could just as easily be fully automated. If your list is small (<25-30k), you can use their mailing list features to blast send. When I got higher than that, I switched over to manually batching my emails to properly handle warmups/etc.
I just hired 2 teenagers that were hungry to do exactly what I told them to write, they were paid very well + revshare, eventually they did research and wrote very nice SEO pieces.
You can't. Unless you want to generate garbage each week.
Hey, sidebar.io is open source and automated. Maybe it helps.
The repo link is on the link.
Hpe it helps!
Wow that is impressive
Yeah, sidebar.io is a great project.
Speak of the devil.
I was revisiting an all times favourite, for this particular need.
Parabola.io has a case study mirroring what you are looking for.
https://parabola.io/recipes/travel-newsletter
Hope this will make you smile
I've hacked this together with a Pocket <> Airtable <> Custom PHP code custom solution. If there is interest, maybe I build it out beyond my needs.
What kind of content do you need generated?
thank you for the help
With a bunch of caveats that I put almost no work into styling, it's all very specific to the format and sources of my personal blog's newsletter, and relies on external tools (some common, one not but definitely ignorable), I put together this repository last year, for the code I use to grab my monthly comments, some blog analytics, my RSS feed reader, and my browser bookmarks, to push a newsletter out to MailChimp, ready to review and send. Each component is separated into its own script for more modular replacements.
Like I said, I didn't write it as a general purpose tool and it probably couldn't easily be turned into a public service (given that it relies on some local data) without serious restructuring, for example, but it probably wouldn't be hard for individuals to adapt it to their needs, for what that's worth, if nothing better comes along.
That's cool! Couple of weeks back, I also planned the same thing. One component that can simplify is you prepare the draft for preview and ultimately finalize the draft when its time to send, but simply update an entry in your generated RSS feed and plug that into Mailchimp.
Essentially, this is how I am planning to build my content pipeline: https://twitter.com/ashfame/status/1353994400662134785/photo/1
but I am yet to realize the mileage of the setup. Like Mailchimp, I think can only send out a certain time in the day, and not as soon as it detects it, which kinda sucks. Makes me want to roll out my own solution. Email Octopus doesn't even have RSS integration yet. So, I haven't seen a cool (free tier eligible) solution that just works.
Ah, that's a twist that could've simplified things, yeah. So far, posting as a draft hasn't been too bad, since I can then open the browser to the dashboard and send from there, but I'll definitely need to think about this in the future. Thanks!