Email Marketing- The New Door To Door Salesman

Hey there! This is part of my documentation for how I spent a month helping Raposa Technologies launch! I used this time to do a lot of research, learn a bunch of new skills, and focus on code and copywriting the whole time. If you want to know what I did, how I did it, and who Raposa Technologies is, click here!

Look through any of my past content and you’ll see how often I do email marketing campaigns with Mailchimp.

It’s easy to use, gets the job done and it’s free. It was love at first use.

Working with Raposa.Tech has involved a lot more than creating a simple email marketing campaign. And to be honest, Mailchimp just couldn’t do what I needed to do. Thus my love affair with Mailchimp had broken up. Closing one account, I opened another- a new love interest called Mailjet. And we’ve never been happier.

Mailjet offers a lot of the same things as Mailchimp. In fact, they really are basically fully interchangeable. There were two factors that caused the swap though; price and API.

Raposa is a new company with only two employees- money was very much an option. Sure I used the free version of Mailchimp, but for a full-scale online presence, that just wouldn’t cut it. Mailjet was considerably less expensive in the long run.

One of my goals was to integrate an API system. That means I had to create an email out of an API. Mailjet just made this process so much easier in the long run with their dev.mailjet guides and formatting already ready to be used.

*Disclosure: The APIs have not been fully developed as happenings in the personal lives of the Raposa team prevented the App and backtest system from being fully produced.

The first thing I did once I signed in was to start an automatic email template. My goal was to create four different email templates to use as a guide for when the API’s are functional:

• Welcome Email: generated after signing up with the Raposa
• Feedback email: generated when a customer emails us for any reason
• Backtest Email: generated to include the results of each test ran through the algorithm
• Suggestion Email: generated based on recent investment experience and preferences

I started with a basic template and began to customize it to fit my needs. I wanted the emails to be short and sweet- our average customer isn’t worried about the frills and bows and doesn’t need any distractions.

My goals

I wanted the emails to only contain the information that was needed along with all the links for the customer to easily find. Since this is a startup, we need people to create interest in the company and the product. Making it clean and professional was a good starting place to reach that goal.

This resulted in my first email template: my welcome email. This automatic email got sent to anyone who signed up with the sign-up button shown at the top of the page.

I also wanted to make an email automatically be sent out if someone was to send us a question or any kind of feedback. This was to show the customer that we did receive it and is a way to provide additional resources for them to explore while we get back to them

This is the backtest email. Since the app is not fully developed and the website and system have not been made fully public yet, the coding is not correct. The API in the center is a connection to the App, where it will provide the individual results for that specific test.

My last email is an automatic email that will send to our customers periodically if they are not actively backtesting and trading. I put in an example of Starbucks (SBUX) and Apple (APPL) to demonstrate how it would work. Instead of just an image drop as I have done here, it will have an API for both the suggested stock and the previous interest stock.

I plan to learn a lot more about javascript and APIs in the coming months. These emails are fine on their own, but on a large scale we would need to hire out without the APIs to help.

Mailjet has some pretty good guides that helped me understand exactly what I was doing. They made it possible to even just copy their template and make the modifications I needed from there. But to actually produce the code I wanted, I have been using Postman.

The best part about Postman is they also have a section for newbies like myself called Postman Learning Center. If you are just getting into code yourself, this platform has a plethora of information to help out.

Overall I am pleased with the work I put together. It isn’t exactly what I wanted since we couldn’t get the APIs to fully function, but it creates a very useable outline and idea to lean on.

Although my goals have not been fully met, I have gained an incredible amount of knowledge from doing this project. I learned all about APIs, email marketing tactics (vias design), basic JSON coding, and I learned it in a very limited amount of time.