Email Course: setup in Brevo (SendinBlue)

[theo-cox]

Work out - by doing it - how to setup a simple email course in Brevo.

• Started when you sign up e.g. with a form
• Sent a first email
• Sent the next one a day later (or BONUS early at request)
• ...

Can start with a trial run by creating the course from e.g. two input emails. ie. given two emails in markdown in a gist or github repo have a little course

Next part would be documenting or doing the setup for the full course.

Job Stories

When i have a course drafted i want to copy it over as quickly as possible

• draft in gdocs (or markdown)
• want to add standard footer (e.g. re unsubcribe, other materilas etc)

When i revise my course i want to update my existing emails as easily as possible

• implies that doing first job story kind of again easily is important

Acceptance

Tryout

• [x] Create two simple emails (can come from our course or otherwise) ✅2023-05-17 see the repo
• [x] "course" (automation) created with templates based on those emails
  • [x] At least email template creation / updating should be automated

Tooling and docs

• [x] Script or docs for how to create the course (can be very short if obvious in brevo) 🚧2023-05-17 see automation how to below
• [x] Have a script for updating the course content
• [x] Have docs on how to update content

Tasks

Test email course

• [x] Is the email course in our public repo? ✅2023-05-16 Not for now
• [x] Create a private git repo ✅2023-05-16 using the brevo-utils repo
• [x] Export some of text to markdown and add to repo (2 files)
• [x] Create the course i.e. the automation ✅ 2023-05-18
  • [x] create a test form in brevo - Test course form
  • [x] create test list - Course test list (in diginomics)
  • [x] create automation - Course test
  • [x] Automation sends 3 emails currently setup with 1min delay
  • [x] Add docs for automation in README https://github.com/life-itself/brevo-utils#creating-a-course-automation-workflow-in-brevo
• [x] Script for adding / updating the templates ✅ 2023-05-18
  • [x] 3 files at diginomic-101/ ...day-0.md ...day-1.md ...day-2.md
  • [x] add necessary frontmatter for template title, subject, etc.
  • [x] day-0.md as first welcome email sent immediately after signup

Notes

Email creation howto / notes

• [x] Sendinblue/Brevo doesn't seem feasible for this kind of editing. See: https://newsletter2go-help-en.sendinblue.com/create-newsletters/newsletter-editor/can-i-copy-content-from-a-word-doc-into-my-email.html
  • [x] I don't have tech knowhow to see but this could be an option: https://github.com/eastenluis/markdown-email-editor
  • [x] You can edit in HTML it seems if that works...

Means you need to use the inbuilt editor and do things internally. Quickstart guide to the editor: https://help.brevo.com/hc/en-us/articles/360016831820-Drag-Drop-Editor-New-design-Part-1-Editor-Overview-

Alternatives

• [x] Convertkit? https://convertkit.com/resources/blog/create-an-email-course ✅2023-05-29 ❌ staying with brevo as found a route to do this
• [x] Mailcoach is 9.99/month and seems to allow this (and has automation) ✅2023-05-29 ❌ see previous
  • https://mailcoach.app/pricing
  • https://mailcoach.app/blog/4-writing-a-newsletter-in-markdown-on-mailcoach

Automation Howto

For the Diginomics 101 course we want to send 5 emails over 5 days, triggered when people sign up.

This makes use of Brevo's automation features: https://www.sendinblue.com/blog/email-automation/#what-are-automated-emails

The process is fairly simple. Login and navigate to the automation section on the side menu and create a new automation. The key things are:

An entry point: this is the trigger that starts the email.

We'll want to select the diginomics 1010 signup form:

Workflow steps: these are the ordered steps triggered by the entry condition. They can be chained together using the little "+" icon

We basically just need to automate sending an email and a wait condition equaling 1 day.

Each new email will require a new template:

And the wait can be set under "conditions"

Final thing is to test the workflow - click the little the little conical flask icon (top right of screeenshot) and enter test email

You're then good to go!

[theo-cox]

@rufuspollock @khalilcodes see here for automation notes

[rufuspollock]

@khalilcodes regarding creating email templates we can't use markdown directly in brevo it seems. However, maybe we can get around this via api using html - see https://developers.brevo.com/reference/createsmtptemplate and excerpt below.

Suggestion: could you spend 30-1h seeing if you can:

• [x] create/update an email template with html via the API
• [x] 🏆 markdown => html => email
• [x] 🏆 Updating an email template

const SibApiV3Sdk = require('sib-api-v3-sdk');
let defaultClient = SibApiV3Sdk.ApiClient.instance;

let apiKey = defaultClient.authentications['api-key'];
apiKey.apiKey = 'YOUR API KEY';

let apiInstance = new SibApiV3Sdk.TransactionalEmailsApi();

let smtpTemplate = new SibApiV3Sdk.CreateSmtpTemplate();

smtpTemplate.sender = {"name":"John Doe","email":"example@example.com"};
smtpTemplate.templateName = "Example Template";
smtpTemplate.htmlContent = "<html><body><h1>This is my first transactional email</h1></body></html>";
smtpTemplate.subject = "New Subject";
smtpTemplate.replyTo = "replyto@domain.com";
smtpTemplate.toField = "example@example.com";
smtpTemplate.isActive = true;
smtpTemplate.attachmentUrl = "https://example.net/upload-file";

apiInstance.createSmtpTemplate(smtpTemplate).then(function(data) {
  console.log('API called successfully. Returned data: ' + JSON.stringify(data));
}, function(error) {
  console.error(error);
});

[khalilcodes]

@rufuspollock script moved to https://github.com/life-itself/create-template

[khalilcodes]

@rufuspollock updated tasks for script and automation. Basically the steps are creating templates (for each days) and then adding those in the automation workflow.

[rufuspollock]

@khalilcodes great. and what was the bug with the template creation in the end?

Also can you update acceptance?

[rufuspollock]

FIXED. Have a working script, follow up more ambitious workflow in life-itself/brevo-utils#1