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Comment by pdksam | Hacker News Reader

What service do you use for templatizing amd sending the emails? Are they personalized?

We simply send emails using gmail API. They are personalized a bit, I run everything from jupyter notebook. Not a big fan of services like mailchimp. We keep personal approach so I prefer to land in primary inbox vs "promotions" as most customers are businesses and we've had exchanges over the email. We're just under 2k which is the daily limit for gmail, will start using SMTP with it since that gets you 10k emails a day.

I'd be very interested to hear more details about your jupyter notebook setup for sending emails

It's embarrassingly primitive, we export all existing subscribers into csv from our CRM, I load it into pandas dataframe and send using simple for loop + gmail api calls. I run it with "caffeinate" terminal command and use time.sleep() to time the sending for the morning as I tend to wake up pretty late. Other times when I'm travelling I just push updated csv into google cloud vm and let it run there.

A more advanced setup would be sqlite + keeping timestamps, message and thread ids for future work e.g. analytics on responses.

You can track opens using GA tracking pixel.

What's wrong with MailChimp?

You might also spread your campaign across several days. That how we do for our customers sending over 10,000 with Gmail.

I really like MJML. It's an abstraction layer that targets most email providers.

You still need to test with a service like Litmus, but it gets you 90% of the way there.

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