Last year, Smooch became the only messaging platform that enables true cross-channel conversations through the Smooch Web Messenger.

Since then, we’ve introduced our Channel Linking API that allows developers to programmatically create these experiences by associating SMS & Facebook Messenger entities to the Smooch customer record.

Today, we’re adding the ability to add an email address to the customer record through our Channel Linking API so that conversations started on any Smooch channel can be continued over email, via Mailgun.

Why should I use it?

Continuing a conversation over email can be indispensable for channels that can’t notify the user like Web Messenger. Additionally, some users will always prefer email for certain sensitive information. For things like confirmations and receipts, email is still favored by many since you can easily archive, search or print messages.

You can also use this capability to proactively reach out to users for which you have an email address and permission to contact via email. This enables you to send a campaign or a transactional notification that can result in a conversation handled entirely through Smooch and your software. For example, if you are building a hotel management system, you can use Smooch to fire off a confirmation email, SMS and Facebook Message upon room reservation. When the user replies to this message across any of these 3 channels, your system will be able to manage the entire conversation with ease.

How does it work?

Our Channel Linking API can now take in an email address for end-users which then creates a Mailgun clients for them. Whenever a message is sent to this user, Smooch will now use this client as part of our automatic message delivery. For example, if a user starts a conversation on Web Messenger and you pass their email address to the Channel Linking API, the user will receive email replies even after he closes the browser.

To start a conversation, you can also use clients created via the Channel Linking API to specifically target Mailgun which will create a new conversation.

Getting started

You can start adding a Mailgun client to your existing user with an API call like this:

curl https://api.smooch.io/v1/appusers/deb920657bbc3adc3fec7963/channels \  
     -X POST \
     -d '{"type": "mailgun", "confirmation": {"type": "immediate"}, "address": "their@email.com", "subject": "This will be the subject of the email"}' \
     -H 'content-type: application/json' \
     -H 'authorization: Bearer your-jwt'

For a specific user identified with appUserId, we are adding a channel of type mailgun using “their@email.com” as their address. Notice the subject field, it will be used for any subsequent messages sent by email, so that a conversation stays in the same thread in the end-user’s email client. Also note that confirmation type immediate is the only confirmation type available for Mailgun.

What’s next

If you have a Mailgun integration already set up in your Smooch app, you can start adding Mailgun clients to your users today.