Show HN: Email Templating API | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: Email Templating API

sendwithus.com

38 pointsnbrempel40 comments

In related news, if you're using ASP.NET MVC, there is a way to use the familiar Razor templating engine to template your emails (or anything else, really). To do that you just need to install RazorEngine ( http://razorengine.codeplex.com/ ) - it exposes Razor in a way that it can be used for things other than rendering pages.

Here's how I use it right now:

  string templateFile = HttpContext.Current.Server
    .MapPath("~/App_Data/InviteUser.cshtml");
  string template = System.IO.File.ReadAllText(templateFile);
  var model = new
  {
    inviterName = "A user",
    inviterEmail = inviterEmail,
    manufacturerName = inviterMfr,
    UserId = person.PrimaryEmail,
    UserPassword = person.GeneratedPassword,
  };
  var bodyHtml = RazorEngine.Razor.Parse(template, model);

And the template:

  <html>
  <body>
    <p>
        @Model.inviterName (@Model.inviterEmail) 
        @if (Model.manufacturerName != null)
        {
            <span>on behalf of <b>@Model.manufacturerName</b></span>
        }
        is inviting you to explore Mercury Catalog by AmpTab - the best furniture catalog app for the iPad:
    </p>
  [SNIP-SNIP]

That's pretty cool Denis. We don't have an official .Net client yet, but we do have some solid code samples for our REST API.

In our experience email templates are a little different from regular HTML templates; things like built-in css inlining, A/B testing, and giving access to non-technical folks.

I see. The linked page pigeonholes you as a competitor to Razor (or other similar templating libraries) - none of the other benefits are even mentioned there. I think it's going to be a problem for you - people jump to conclusions based on what they see.

You're correct Denis, our developer page purely speaks to the "get templates out of source code" value prop -- maybe a mistake, but it was something we were testing today :)

Free: https://github.com/niftylettuce/node-email-templates

This is awesome. I have been half assed building an identical product for a while now, but I just can't stand dealing with html email templates. You will definitely have me as a customer for my next project. A couple thoughts:

1. The "with" in your logo is the same color as your links. Since your links aren't underlined, it makes the "with" look like a link. You should change the color of one of them.

2. The error message when I click 'execute command' without changing my email isn't obvious enough.

3. I want to see the editor. What is the interface the marketing team will see? Maybe put the template you are going to send next to that curl box.

4. Do you have decent html and responsive templates? If so, this is a selling point on its own.

Thanks for the feedback, and woo +1 future customer :)

Our developers page is really new, so there's definite room for improvement. 1+2 definitely need a look tonight.

3. The UI here could use work; the template is actually in the horizontal section ABOVE the curl box ...

You can signup (no cc required) and check the editor out, or just watch our getting started video (which we need to make more public): http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kQhLeBU9wrs

4. Yup, responsive emails included out of the box. We'll be adding more templates shortly (a lot of requests for this lately!)

I wanted to highlight our (open source) API clients, covering most languages: https://github.com/sendwithus

Here's all the code required to send an email with our Python client:

   api.send(email_id='YOUR-EMAIL-ID',
       recipient={'address': 'us@sendwithus.com'})

There are more complex examples covering unique senders, cc/bcc, dynamic data, and attachments, but it's good to get a sense of how much complexity this can remove from your codebase.

I don't mean to trigger a bout of programming depression[1], but I don't see the value in this.

Is the idea that you can have nontechnical people write the templates, and your app... gets a list of the templates they've made and sends them out?

What's the benefit of using this over just, you know, writing an erb template? Or is the value for environment that don't have ActiveMail?

1. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7228491

Hey Christian, valid feedback. As a product/business scales, small problems of modifying templates (and AB testing, etc) get magnified, and in house solutions don't scale.

Gotcha gotcha - that makes more sense. I can see the need for this if there was a marketing department that needed separate CRUD for emails.

I imagine if your marketing team can write an ERB template, you don't need this. My current flow - marketing guy sends me an email saying "what does the 1 week follow up email say right now?". I send back the email. He sends back edits. I commit them and deploy.

Yep, that's the exact workflow we're replacing! Think of the experience for the marketing guy -- after those changes are committed, how can he measure what affect they had?

I'd use this if I could use it with [Amazon SES](http://aws.amazon.com/ses/).

Hi Kulte, we support SES for delivery right now!

I take it the point of this to remove templates from your code base? Can you have custom IDs for the email templates (ex: "welcome_email")?

Allowing email id's to be specified is something we've considered, but for now static id's we auto generate are simple enough.

We encourage our customers to use a static "mapping", with constants set to each template id. IE WELCOME_EMAIL = '12345'

As a customer, SendWithUs has great customer service.

I signed up for SendWithUs and had a problem integrating it with my email sender. They helped me fix the issue and were really fast to respond. I'd recommend every startup try out SendWithUs.

I haven't used it for that long yet, so I can't really review the product itself, but so far it's great.

I think this is idea is the perfect middle ground product between what mail gun offers and what something like constant contact would offer. Developers and marketers get a ton of features and customization without sacrificing a ton of development time. Also the "CEO's direct phone number" for the top tier plan made giggle.

Thanks! Complex products like exact target or constant contact really hinder development; our hope is to make everyone's lives easier.

I implemented something similar at the company I work for. It started off with a dashboard that would allow us to send the Top 20 Hotels each week via email. Then we started templating a lot of emails. Now I just have a server setup which accepts all the data and sends you back the generated HTML. It's much simpler for us that way.

That's pretty impressive! When you really look at it, every company needs this at some point. It's just a question of if you want to spend the resources/time building it internally, or if you want to focus on your core product :)

Thanks! It's definitely been worth the time for us. A lot of the code on our API is from the original project, but setup to allow new templates to be created etc.

I don't get what sendwithus does. Ok, you do A/B testing, ok, you also do drip campaigns, but what's the end-goal for this? I know if I want to send newsletters I use mailchimp. If I'm a developer and I want to send bulk emails, I will use Mailgun. What does SendWithUs do?

Sendwithus is for your transactional/triggered email you're sending through Mailgun; a signup or notification email. At a basic level, get your product email out of your source code, and get the benefits of a dedicated templating product.

Love this! I actually wrote a pluggable Django app for work that is basically doing what this service offers. Been meaning to open source it! This is motivation to do so :)

Cool Bart, look forward to seeing it! In our experience internal systems can't compare with the product a dedicated team can build. I've had many conversations with companies moving away from a poor internal solution.

That being said, huge fan of open source and there's plenty of room for products and tools in this space :)

Of course! I totally agree. Kudos to your team for releasing an actual product. I didn't mean to say my tool was just as comparable. It merely gives me some greedy validation that hey, the tool I built might be useful to others!

Missing out on Dotmailer http://www.dotmailer.co.uk integration which would stop me from using it.

What means "active users?" (in pricing plans)

An active user is someone you've sent an email to in a given month, regardless of volume. So you could send 10,000 emails to 1,000 unique email addresses and you're billed for 1,000 customers.

Any suggestions on how to better describe that?

Perhaps "subscribers" instead of "users"?

That may be confusing because we focus on transactional email, not campaign email (which subscriber would suggest)

Personally would rather have it be based on number of emails. Make more sense. I'll probably give this a try though!

Thanks Frank! The reason we tier on customers is that we sit on top of an esp like Mailgun, which already bill per transaction.

I'd describe it as an unlimited number of emails that you can send with a limit of 1000 unique email addresses that you can send to.

Thanks for the suggestions, we'll revise this tonight.

"Unique users per month"?

Unique recipients per month?

$79/mo + sendgrid (or whoever) fees/mo for A/B testing only?

Why would I leave Aweber/Mailchimp?

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