I’m pleased to introduce our latest email integration: Mailgun.
Mailgun is a reliable email delivery system that enables you to send, receive and track email ‘effortlessly’ and it scales to massive volumes. And it’s trusted by companies we love and admire such as: Stripe, Github, Slack & Heroku.
At Smooch, we’ve been using Mailgun ourselves for a long time and are big fans. They really are the experts in solving all the well known pitfalls of sending and receiving emails programmatically. Mailgun provides all the tools to follow Email best practices and manage your email reputation by using you own company domain, SPF & DKIM signatures, constant sender IP and correctly formed Message ID and Received headers to ultimately keep your email delivery rate as high as possible. You also get detailed reporting on email usage including specifics such as open rates and bounce rates so that you can adapt to the feedback email service providers (such as Gmail) are sending back. For very high usage, Mailgun even offer a fully managed delivery and reputation service.
Now we’ve made it easy for you to bring your own Mailgun account to Smooch so that you can build conversational experiences using email. Simply manage customer communications using our built-in integrations or go further and build email into conversation flows in your own software using the Smooch API.
Smooch manages the email channel just like our other messaging channels such as Facebook Messenger, Viber, SMS and our mobile and web SDKs. This means that if you're using our unified API you can start using email without any additional code.
Email’s place in the messaging world
It's clear that email still has its own valuable place in the messaging world. Depending on your industry, customer segments and specific use case, email is often the preferred channel for your customers or the first one they’ll think about using.
Email is a great channel for conversations that take place over a longer period of time, that aren’t fast-paced or requires longer messages.
For example, we see email being the best channel to send monthly digest or other communication that a customer is likely to keep in archive and want to search for in the future.
Another big advantage of email is that is makes it possible for businesses to initiate conversations without the opt-in constraints that many messaging apps require. It can actually be used as a way to on board your users into a more rich and convenient messaging channel.
How it works
Email on Smooch behaves just like our other channels, here’s how it works:
A customer sends a message to your configured email address, for example info@company.com
You receive their message via all your configured Business system or Webhooks
You can then reply from that same business system or via our Post Message API
Your message is delivered to the email address used by the customer
The integration has great support for our rich channel. For example, messages can contain text, images, unicode emojis and action links. For capabilities not natively supported on email, Smooch will automatically send an adapted text version of the message.
How to set it up
You’ll first need to get yourself a Mailgun account and connect and verify a domain to be used to send & receive emails.
Next, you connect the Mailgun integration in your Smooch dashboard, copy your Mailgun API key into Smooch and select the email address people will use to message you.
Alternatively, you can enable Mailgun via our integration API. You just need to provide your API key, domain and incoming email address and you’re ready to send and receive emails just like messages on other channels.
Time to test it! Send yourself an email to the configured address and check that you’ve received it in your configured business system or webhooks.
All done!
Let us know how you plan on integrating email in your messaging toolbox and make sure to reach out with any feedback or if you need help with your Mailgun integration.