Comment by clairity | Hacker News Reader

Comment by clairity | Hacker News Reader

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are there any services (mailwizz, mailtrain, sendy, email octopus, mailjet, mailgun, etc.) that supports the personalized newsletter use case (which is "one level deeper" than the personalized email use case)? it's not obvious from any of their sites, and i'm hoping someone here might know right off the bat. =)

meaning that each issue of the newsletter can include a set of like content items (e.g., articles) but the bundle of content is specific to each user (user 1 gets content items 1, 2, and 3, while user 2 gets content items 1, 3 and 5). this is one level deeper than just simple personalization like "Hi Joe, thanks for signing up with us on Saturday, Mar 4...".

i've yet to see a marketing email provider offer this functionality very well, if at all. for example, sendgrid (which i'm using now) supports it via a convoluted combination of section and substitution tags that is not very well documented. but most systems (including mailchimp, constant contact, etc.) don't even contemplate this use case.

I use Green Arrow engine + studio, by the folks at drh.net, and it can do that very well. You can basically get a hook that will execute your arbitrary code for each contact - database lookup on a remote service, whatever. So you can build very complex newsletters that are totally customized to each recipient. And it is fast as can be (can pretty easily push 1M+ messages per hour if you have that much volume to send)

In order to take full advantage of it you need to be a developer though.

It's got great pricing too, esp. if you get their perpetual license and then run it on your own dedicated server (they set it up.)

thanks, i can code so i'll take a look. =)

Dada Mail [0] can do that (unless I'm mistaken on what you're trying to do), as its email templating language is just HTML::Template::Expr, so you can have if statements, ala:

    <!-- tmpl_if subscriber.state eq 'CO' --> 
    
        Here's what's happening in Colorado!
    
    <!-- /tmpl_if -->

It's been a feature for at least a decade, I believe. Sending via Amazon SES is also supported.

[0] http://dadamailproject.com

that seems like the simple personalization case, not the personalized newsletter use case i'm after, but i'll take a look-see. thanks!

I have the exact same use case and have not been able to find a service that does it. We have a machine learning service that generates some content for each user but the rest of the email is just a standard newsletter.

In the end we just fire it from our web application like a transaction email, this has a few disadvantages though:

- Sending to our list of 100k users takes a good portion of the day, although this could be fixed if we used the bulk send APIs our transnational email provider has.

- Our marketing team can't easily edit the rest of the content in the newsletter so it generally remains pretty static or needs developer time just to send a newsletter.

I'm not really sure how such a service would work though, would the email provider make a webhook call back to your servers with the user id and you server return the content for that section?

It looks like Amazon SES itself supports personalized emails as another person ITT mentions:

https://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/whats-new/2017/10/amazon-se...

https://docs.aws.amazon.com/ses/latest/DeveloperGuide/send-p...

Not sure if any of the 3rd party scripts offer it though.

Check out customer.io -- you can handle many levels deeper than first_name last_name and use customer attributes to not only send or not send an entire message, but also use Liquid to add conditions within the body of an email to serve up the right content to an audience.

Beyond newsletters you can add transactional and segment-specific campaigns.

I DO work there, so take my recommendation with that in mind...And I am not trolling ycombinator for every email conversation.

thanks, i took a quick look and found http://learn.customer.io/recipes/role-based-messaging-campai... (it's nice that you have these recipes).

but that recipe illustrates the exact issue i run into (and maybe you have a better solution): i don't want to have to define branches for each segment ("role" in the recipe) in your campaign manager. i want to pass in a collection of recipients (each having the role attribute set) and hashes of attributes with each tied to a role, and have the template select the appropriate hash of attributes to display (e.g., [title, date, author, body, image] for articles) based on that attribute rather than creating whole new templates and branches for each segment.

this let's me programmatically add more "versions" of the newsletter without going through the clunky process of branching and duplicating templates (it's DRY'ing out the templating process).

so with articles for example, west coasters get article A and east coasters get article B, each having their own hash of [title, date, author, body, image] slotted into the right places based on the location attribute on the recipient (in this example).

liquid could be the answer, but does your API make it easy to pass in a hash of hashes to make it all work? many products seem to be missing this particular feature and as a result, don't work for my use case.

This is the job of a marketing automation tool. you might have a look at Mautic, Hubspot or Marketo which will then plug into the mail sending service.

yes, i've looked at all of those too. hubspot can do it, but it's overkill for my use case (i am helping a client implement hubspot). marketo is ungodly expensive. mautic requires setting up another server and maintaining it, in php no less.

Hi clairity, check https://www.vestorly.com/ we do just what you mentioned in an way that it's easy for you to setup. Please don't hesitate on asking me if you need more information

I've experimented with building something like this but not at any scale.

Is there a use case that doesn't involve writing code to do the personalization? I've been picking articles with some machine learning stuff but I'm not convinced that would work for many people.

i don't know that it requires custom code, but it would require the ability to write declarative rules for selecting the content (many marketing automation systems now have a visual campaign sequencer which is similar in functionality).

it would combine essentially a CMS with marketing automation, where content can be fed into the system (either created or curated) and the newsletter template would slot the selected content into the available spaces based on the rules (and/or via machine learning).

but yes, machine-selected content would be a logical next step after what i'm describing.

Django Wagtail CMS has an interesting 'content personalisation' feature which could work for this.

If you involve that package in the render step before you send, it should be able to do what you need to.

Sailthru can do that

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