Email management with SendGrid is impossible

[Jean_Thoensen]

We have a seasonal workforce of 2,000 to 5,000 people. During twice a year events, we need to email these people many times based on views. We 're wrapping up our first event of the year, and the messaging has been a disaster. We are spending (wasting) HOURS on email management.

Our IT department will not allow us to use Airtable's built-in email features so we must use the SendGrid extension.

Requirements

1. Look up a person and see which emails were sent to them.
2. Resend an email to a specific person.
3. Email templates that can be reused and/or copied for future events.

The Extensions dashboards are impossible to manage. The "Manage Extensions" window is so narrow that you can't see the full titles of the extensions. Making it full screen doesn't help.

Extensions appear to be ordered from oldest to newest with no way to sort or search them.

When you do find the extension you want, you then have to choose the view for it. We cannot discover any sorting logic to that list. All you seem to be able to do is keep hitting "A", for example, to find (one at a time) all the view that start with the letter "A".

We're open to an add-on product, if necessary. We are on the Enterprise plan.

[kuovonne]

When you use the SendGrid extension, Airtable does not store the fact that you sent an email. If you continue to use the SendGrid extension, you will need to somehow manually record which emails were sent to which people.

Can you share screen shots explaining your difficulty in using the "Manage Extensions" window/panel, even when it is full screen? You should be able to make the entire "Manage Extensions" panel full screen and/or an individual extension full screen. Either method should make the full titles of extensions visible. You can also organize different extensions into different dashboards to make it easier to find the exact extension you want. You can also manually drag extensions around within a dashboard to re-order them.

The sorting logic for picking a view in an extension depends on how the extension was written. It might use the default sort order provided by Airtable, or it might have some other sort. The sort order might be the order in which the views were created, or it might be the order in which views appear in the views panel on the left.

[kuovonne]

Some food for thought:

- Do you want to use a template that you maintain in Airtable, or a template in your email campaign provider?

- Do you want to track which emails have been sent in Airtable or in your email campaign provider?

If you want to track which emails have been sent in Airtable and also maintain templates in Airtable, you could use a system where you create linked record of individual emails, with one record for each combination of recipient and merged message. Then you could have SendGrid (or another service) actually send the email.

I am picturing an [Email Templates] table, and an [Emails] table, to go with your [Workers] table. The [Email Templates] table would hold email templates in a long text field. the [Emails] table would have junction records between the [Email Templates] and [Workers]. The merged contents for the message could be created via scripting, or with formula fields with lots of nested SUBSTITUTE() formulas. You could use scripting or automations to create the junction records.

The [Emails] junction table should also have an editable field for indicating if an email has been sent or not, such as a date field for when the email was sent. If you use an automation integration, the automation can check for new, unsent emails, send them, and then mark them as sent. If you use the SendGrid extension instead of an automation, you will point the SendGrid extension to the view of unsent records. Then, after you send the emails, you will need to manually mark the email records as sent.