Send batch html email to contacts matching conditions
Hi, I feel this is a tough one and I would like to have some help to figure out where to start.
I have a table of contacts and I want to send batch html emails to some of them only, depending on conditions, eg by country. It would also like to populate those emails with data coming from the contacts records, but also from other tables depending on what those batch emails will be about.
Here’s a simplified example of what I need. One day I may need to send information about project A (from a “project” table) to my contacts in Canada. A week later I may need to send information about project B to my contacts in England.
How would you do something like that? I expect I will need to use some sort of extension like Make, or maybe sendgrid? And maybe some sort of “Campaign” table, and automations?
Thanks all for the help!
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You could probably do all of that with Airtable’s built-in automations if you want to send the emails directly from your own Gmail or Outlook account, but if you’re going to be sending a ton of bulk email messages, you might hit against the restrictions & sending limits of Gmail and Outlook.
In that case, it would be much better to use a 3rd-party “transactional email” service like SendGrid, although I strongly recommend against using SendGrid. (See below for some other recommendations from me.)
As you mentioned in your message above, if you’re going to use a 3rd-party “transactional email” service, then you would need to automate that by turning to Make’s advanced automations & integrations.
Although, I should add that even if you are sending from your own Gmail or Outlook account, I would still recommend using Make — because it is so much more powerful and so much more customizable than Airtable’s automations. (You would just use Make’s Gmail integrations or Make’s Outlook integrations.)
As I mentioned above, I would strongly recommend looking for an alternative to SendGrid. SendGrid is one of the most difficult & frustrating platforms that I have worked with, and their tech support is very poor as well.
My current favorite email sending platform is MailGun. It is easy to setup, easy to configure, and their tech support is very responsive.
However, there are several other email sending apps to choose from as well, such as MailerSend, Postmark, Brevo, and more. (You could even use Mailchimp’s Transactional Email Service, although I don’t like Mailchimp’s support either.)
Yeah having a Campaigns table makes sense. With reference to your example it’d be where you select the Project and Country for that campaign and I’ve set up something here for you to check out
Airtable comes with their native ‘Send Email’ action as well as the ability for you to send emails via a Gmail or Outlook account, so you could just handle it all on Airtable really (unless you’re planning on sending out like hundreds of emails a day or something)
Assuming your data looks something like this:
Then your Campaign table would look something like this:
And your automation would look something like this where you’d have a ‘Find Record’ action to look for all the Contacts with that Country selected:
And you’d use the results of that Find Record action to compile all of those contact emails to use in a Send Email action
