SendGrid improvements needed

[JoelC]

The SendGrid block is currently unworkable, and it’s forcing us to find another solution. This is a big shame because it’ll require our teams to use two separate tools instead of one, even though this integration exists.

Here are our needs in order of importance:

1. The ability to add links, bullets, bold and italic text. This is baseline and we can’t get away without it even with our most basic emails.
2. Email templates. We have one template that we’d like all of our employees to use for outreach (they should be able to make slight changes to match the context, switch out links, etc). Right now SendGrid just shows an empty text box.
3. Custom reply-to per email blast. We’ll have multiple people using our Airtable, and we’d like the emails they send out to reply back to them. Right now it seems the block only supports a global reply-to email, which means only one person can use it at a time.

These are the things we can do without, but would be nice quality-of-life features:

4. A more straightforward way to select contacts. Right now it’s unclear what is meant by Messages will only be sent to records in this view. Does this include filters? Does this mean we’ll need separate individual views every time we want to send out an email? Ideally we’ll be able to alternatively select rows and send emails out just to those rows.

Thanks so much!

[JoelC]

Additional needs:

5. A way to document emails that have been sent out. For instance, if we sent an email to X people, we want to be able to not contact those people for the next few months by filtering them out. But this can’t be done automatically atm and we’d need to manually add each participant in the airtable to a new “email” table. This is unworkable when you’re dealing with hundreds of users.

[Jason]

The SendGrid block now supports HTML, which you can use to add links bullets, bold and italic text, and more! Just check the “Send as HTML” toggle when drafting your message.