Implementing Automated Mailing

[Anthony Stinson]

I have a small business that wants to be able to minimize manual labor while keeping things simple, so we want all actions happening on Trello without being too complex. We're using Crmble as our primary power-up.

I'm racking my brain over how to implement this specific workflow:

1. Google Form gets filled and card created

2. Personalized (name) thank you email sent

3. On either label add, button, or list movement, send one of many personalized email templates (name and appointment date in the future), including attachments

4. Ability to monitor bounce/read rates

Not very experienced with Trello, so feel free to laugh at me if this is easy. I've checked out Zapier's integrations with Crmble and it seems like there is no appropriate Crmble trigger to execute the needed Mailchimp commands. I think I can get the automated mailing to work by itself, but without personalization, which means some emails have to be manually written. 

P.S. are there ways to get this working with something more price efficient than Mailchimp? Amazon SES is preferred but it looks like Zapier doesn't provide enough functionality for it. 

Much appreciated.

[milynnus · Accepted solution]

@Anthony Stinson 

Except for 4 Contalist should be able to handle your requirements. 

[Anthony Stinson]

Contalist looks amazing for our purposes, thank you! They seem to do customization stuff, so I'll contact them about possibly including bounce rates. Accepting your answer, but if anyone else has recommendations, feel free to give them.

[milynnus]

@Anthony Stinson 

I am using Contalist on several client projects. They had incorporated a few enhancements that I had proposed into their product. 

[Çiğdem Büyükaşik]

Hello @Anthony Stinson

Have you tried the Hipporello Service Desk Power-up? It's a Trello-native service desk and allows you to complete the steps on your workflow without leaving your Trello board.

1. You design forms and publish them on the Hipporello portal or on your website. They get filled and a card is created for each form submission.
2. You can define triggers and actions to automate messages to be sent (e.g. when a form is submitted)
3. And now, after the latest release, you can also save canned responses (aka quick texts) on your Trello card, so that you can use one whenever you need. 
4. Hipporello has an Analytics section which is pretty basic for the time being but will soon offer more complex tools to assess the performance.  

Plus, it's free. Let me know if you need help in setting it up or anything else about it!

[Anthony Stinson]

Thank you very much, I’ll check it out!

[Iain Dooley]

@Anthony Stinson if you're using Crmble, I recently updated the integration for Crmble into my BenkoDesk product which lets you run a shared email inside Trello:

http://www.benkodesk.com/

If your contact details are in the Crmble contact details, you can post a comment like this:

@to crmble Here is a subject line 
Here is your message etc. etc. etc.

and an email will be sent with that subject and message to the contact using the details in the card.

There are multiple ways to automate comments, the most obvious being Butler, although I don't think you can fetch Crmble details to populate into the message using Butler.

Our companion automation platform BenkoBot can fetch data from Crmble fields directly using the API in the same way BenkoDesk does:

http://www.benkobot.com/

So for example we could create an automation that would allow you to have templated auto replies sent out with variable substitution from Crmble data.

When you send an email using this method, it goes out via your Gmail account, so you see both sides of the conversation in and out, and replies come back to the cards so you can manage all your conversations within Trello, including automated outbound emails and the replies.

A new card is created for each email, and a link to the card is added to an Emails checklist on the contact card. Feel free to get in touch if you'd like to run through it.