How To Use Sendgrid - Tutorial For Beginners

hey there scott here your video is going to start in just one moment i just wanted to say thank you for stopping by my channel the video that you're about to see is part of a series of videos all of these videos are educational they're teaching you a strategy or they're teaching you about a new tool or they're walking you through a campaign or somebody's delivering insight all of the people that teach over in these videos some of them are me but a lot of them are other individuals who are subject matter experts in their field i hope that these videos will be useful there's a variety of sales videos marketing videos videos that highlight and discuss different tools and technology as well as videos that discuss high level as well as granular strategy these are meant for individuals that are looking to level up in their own career or if you're going down an entrepreneurial road and you want to understand how to build a business from the ground up a lot of these videos can help you as well if you enjoy the video and you watch the whole thing if you got some value from it which i really hope you do please like obviously hit that subscribe button it means a lot but also i want you to check out two other free resources there's a newsletter a bi-weekly newsletter called roi overload that basically highlights the best the latest the greatest the tools strategy insights articles case studies for sales marketing entrepreneurship and if newsletters aren't your thing then you can also check out the roi overload medium publication again it's a free resource that allows you to read case studies learn from people that have done it before a wide range of authors contribute to the roi overload meeting publication again link is in the description of this video i hope you enjoy these resources i hope you get some benefit out of them that's all i got here's your video [Music] hello and welcome you are now looking at sendgrid.com sendgrid.com is an email service company that makes getting transactional email to your customers at the point of their purchase a priority the company maintains standards and deliverability as one of their unique selling features and they serve companies of all sizes and reputation in addition to transactional email the company does provide autoresponder services allowing you to send both broadcast and automated emails the company is gdpr compliant and has made preparations for those that use its services to also be in compliance now this course we'll focus on both transactional email as well as customer center email and we'll do that so that you can leverage its technology and capability in consistently getting email into the inbox of your customers in the first video we'll discuss plans and pricing i will also discuss all the most important account settings you'll need in order to set up sendgrid with any service in order to get transactional email into your customers inbox it's quite possible you may want to use its services for autoresponder related activities and we'll cover this also also cover some of the technical issues such as suppressions that will help you to continue to maintain your deliverability we'll also cover ways for you to make sure that your account remains secure with those who have permission to use your account and lastly we'll look at some of the statistics available to you that will help you to track how well your emails are doing and what you can do to correct those things that you'd like to see go better okay so with that thanks and i will see you in another video hello and welcome if you have an existing sendgrid account and you are looking at the pricing page you might find that what you have looks differently than what's being presented on the page for example if you have an older plan you could have what's called the free 12k plan which is zero dollars a month allowing you to send 12 000 transactional emails every month if you don't have that plan you'll notice that when you come to the page that there is an essentials plan and it says it's 9.95 for 40 000 emails in a calendar month now if you are going to have transactional emails in excess of 100 emails per day you may not need to sign up for the paid plan so for example if we come to this page you don't have a sendgrid account and you click this link that says try for free it's going to allow you to set up the trial account at 40 000 emails however you aren't going to need to put in a payment account for the setup so once again you'll only need to pay if you go over the 100 email threshold every month now if you intend to use sendgrid for marketing you'll note that at the 9.95 plan that you can store 2 000 contacts that means that you're going to have 2 000 names that you can send marketing emails to however if you're starting with more contacts you can adjust up the estimate bar and you can find out how much send grid is going to cost you every month so for example if we were to move this up to 15 000 contacts then your price would be 15 000 contacts at 20 plus the 9.95 allowing you to send 40 000 emails every month so you'll be able to know exactly what your pricing is going to be based on what you're going to be doing with syngrid again if you're just going to be doing transactional email you probably won't need any contacts you can bring this down to zero and you'll note that this will be 9.95 again if you go over the 100 email threshold on a daily basis so to get started click the try for free link and what you'll need to do is to set up a username a password and then an email address and you'll be asked to confirm that email address and then set up your account once you set up your account you'll be at the dashboard and you'll be ready to start working with sendgrid okay so with that thanks and i will see you in another video welcome back and when you first set up your account you're going to want to make sure that you verify by sending your email so that you can confirm that you were the person that started the account once you do that you'll come to the dashboard and what you're going to want to do is go to the settings area and you do want to verify your plan and billing and if you click inside that link you're going to notice that the plan is that you're going to be able to send 40 000 emails for the first 30 days and we click change plan we'll be able to look at the plan and you'll notice that you have a free plan that you can send 40 000 emails for the first 30 days and then 100 free emails every day thereafter by default send grid gives you a usage limit so that you will be able to know when you're reaching your threshold so if you go inside of this gear and you click edit details you'll notice that once you've reached 90 percent of your limit for the current billing period sendgrid is going to then send you an email now of course you can delete this update but this is a good update for you to keep so that you'll know if you're reaching the point at which you're going to have to pay now you can set up other alerts so for example if we click new alert and we select the type we can set up a status notification alert we can set up the status notification on a daily basis weekly basis or monthly basis and we can set that status notification up to a specific email so this will tell us exactly where our account is on a regular basis in the settings area you'll notice that you have api keys you'll be using these to connect with other services such as wordpress and click funnels if you want to use sendgrid to connect to their email transactional system you'll also have a mail settings area and we'll be working with these mail settings when you get ready to again connect sendgrid to a specific service so that your clients get transactional emails so for the bulk of the course we'll be working within these menus to set up send grid so that it connects with just about any system to give your client the notifications they need in a particular purchase or transaction well pay particular attention to this white label area because this is what will give your transactional email the highest visibility and we'll be covering that in a separate video okay so with that thanks and i'll see you in the next video hello and welcome you are looking at the inside of a website built with wordpress and if we go inside of this link this is a particular membership script that works with wordpress by default plugins like this work with the mail settings on your existing server and that can cause a problem with getting emails delivered for important emails like registration lost information new member notification and unsubscribe and even if you don't use this service with your wordpress installation in most cases the plugin or theme will work with the default settings for your existing server you may be working with an online web application like click funnels or some other membership program it does send out transactional emails that will actually require you to have an email service so that you can ensure deliverability and in those cases you're working with an internal management system called smtp or simple mail transfer protocol this will keep you from having to rely on your program or your installation's usage of cron jobs as well as cued emails so whenever possible you want your web application or installation to rely on an outside sender which will help with deliverability as well as issues of throttling and so one of the main functions of syngrid is to help you to send effective transactional email which is account related activity when you have or you're administering some kind of web-based system and so you're typically talking about password emails system notifications and email verification messages so we want to do now is to configure the settings area so that you'll be able to connect with any web-based application in order to send transactional email we also want to do that in a way that you'll be able to manage with a partner or a loan and to have a secure account as safeguarding data is more important than ever okay so with that thanks and i will see you in another video hello and welcome now this video we are going to start by creating transactional email templates when you're in your dashboard if you go to the left side menu and you click this drop down arrow you're going to see in the template area that you have transactional marketing you're going to click transactional and then that will open up into this screen and you'll be able to create a template you want to click that button now you want to give this template a name and then you're going to click save what you've done first is you've created now a template group as this message says you're now going to click add version if you don't know html code you probably will not be using the code editor you want to start with the design editor or what you see is what you get we're going to click design editor and then we're going to click continue we're going to do first is we're going to click this drop down arrow of template settings we're going to give the template a name we're going to give the email a subject i'm going to write it between these two percentage marks what you can then do is write an email pre-header and this is going to be the small amount of text that you can see previewing what's going to be in the email you can dictate what that's going to be and what you've done is you've configured the template settings what you can do now is you can click the build button and then you can begin to add modules that reflect what you want to have inside of your email template and you can click anywhere inside of the template to activate the modules so for example if we click this button you'll see then that we get the text module when you click inside of this area you're going to see the actual set of settings and content that you can alter you can add in other modules such as a button we're going to do is drag and drop this button inside of the area and now we have our button text we click on top of that button text we can change it we have all of our information in this area to change what the button is when change the button text and we want to have the url we can do that here inside of this box and so basically we can use any one of these blocks to design our template in the way we want it to appear when the individual gets it we can design the email body in terms of color we can design any content container so we have full latitude over what we can do inside of the template to make it look the way we want we can then preview our template by clicking this button and we can then save our template by clicking the top button once our template has been saved we can then go back to the main menu once the template is completed you can then use one of three methods in order to make it part of your email you can use the smtp relay or you can make it part of your template inside of the api okay so at that thanks and i will see you in another video hello and welcome now in setting up sendgrid one of the most important things that you can do is to white label both your email and your domain and you'll see that there is a menu hint item or you can go to the left side menu and you can just click white labels and the overview explains the difference in plain english so in the non-white label example your client will get an email and the email will have a header that says that it's been mailed by sendgrid.com now that means then that that email will be easier to filter out or to filter into either spam or into a promotions tab however when you do the white labeling process your email will reflect the fact that it's being sent by your domain and so you want to be able to use sendgrid in a way that any email that gets sent through your web app actually reflects your domain even though you're using syngrid to improve deliverability so the first process to undertake is to white label your domain and to do that you're going to click add domain now what you're going to do is you're going to give your white label domain a subdomain and then you're going to write in the domain name in this space you're then going to click the default white label and then you're going to click save now send grid is going to give you a warning message that says your dns record must be validated before the white label setup is going to be complete and sometimes that can take up to 48 hours before the changes are updated so we're going to do now is we're going to click confirm now if you work with a virtual private server you can typically copy this information and then you can give this information to your host for them to enter it into your dns records however if you are managing your own domain and hosting you are going to want to enter into your dns records to enter this information now once you've verified through the host that you can enter this information either into your cpanel or your softaculous you'll want to go into your zone editor and you can add in the cname records by clicking this link and adding them one at a time now before we start the process with the host we're going to go through the second white label process and we're going to click email links and what this will do is add a cname record based on the subdomain you set up and it will mask your open and tracking links which you are going to want to do so you're going to click add white label and again just as we did with the domain white label we're going to add another subdomain here in this area we're then going to click save we're then going to want to take this information just as we did with the domain white labeling and we're going to want to put this into the cname record inside of our cpanel or again if you are working with a virtual private server you have managed hosting you can just pass this information to their host and they will take care of this for you and so you'll see this information inside of our service request with the virtual private server once you've entered the information or sent it to your host you'll wait for a period of time in some cases it does take 48 hours for everything to propagate and other times it'll take much less than that you can come back and what you'll do is you'll come to this actions gear and you'll click the validate button then you'll make sure that you get two green check marks here if you want to check the inside and click view you'll see that all three areas are going to be validated the same is going to be true in the links area if you click view and you'll see the two green check marks meaning that these have been validated okay so with that thanks and i'll see you in another video welcome back we are now going to go into the settings area and you'll want to click this link that says mail settings and you're going to see select settings in this menu right now we are going to look at the footer menu once we're inside of the footer we're going to click the edit button and we're going to define what we want our footer to look like now once you've defined what you want your html emails to look like you're also going to want to do the same thing for the text version and once you've done that you'll then click save then in order to begin using your custom footer all you'll need to do is to click this one button and your custom footer is now activated on your send grid emails okay so with that thanks and i will see you in another video hello and welcome when you are working with a web application that is using syngrid in order to send emails you are going to want to work with the event notification settings so that send grid will report the information back to the web app and you'll be able to analyze the results of your email sending now if you click inside of this area you'll notice that there are a couple of settings in particular you're going to notice that there is a post url now this is going to be the app that you're working with now currently you can only work with one app at a time so you're not going to be able to do multiple apps posting to a particular address so for example if we click the edit button you'll notice that there's room for one url that you're going to write in here and typically you're going to get this information from inside of your web app that'll tell you how you're going to connect to either cengrid or your email server now when you scroll down what you're going to notice is that there are some specific settings that you'll want to report back to the web app now in this case we're using one for click funnels and so what's being reported back are the dropped emails bounced unsubscribe from and market spam now you may want to keep more than that information again all for tracking purposes when you've chosen the ones that you're going to want to keep what you're going to do is you're going to click this test integration button to make sure that your connection is working when you click that link what's going to happen is you're going to get a message from syngrid saying a sample notification will be sent to your endpoint shortly and you go ahead and get rid of that and once you have a blue check mark here that means that everything is clear and you can click the save button you'll want to make sure that your event notification then is turned on to be used okay so with that thanks and i will see you in another video welcome back now it's quite possible that you will be using a certain email or a certain domain of emails for testing purposes if that's the case you want to make sure that that email is never suppressed and you can do that inside of the address whitelist settings in syngrid and all you'll need to do is to go to this options area and then you'll need to edit and you can either write in the particular email that you do not want suppressed or you can write in the entire domain of emails so that those emails will always appear in those that you are sending another setting of note is that you can bcc an address for every email that is sent so if you want to have one or record sent to your support or you want all my emails archived in some way you can do that with the bcc setting you'll just click edit and then you'll write the email where you want this email sent if you get spam reports you can have those spam reports forwarded to you all you need to do is come inside of this area you'll click edit and then you'll give a forwarding address and then turn this section on that's quite possible that you already have an html template that you like to use for your transactional or your marketing emails and you may not have the wherewithal to have this programmed by someone if you have the html and you can place the source inside of this panel you can use this template and have it customized for all of your marketing emails once you've customized all of the settings you're ready then to connect with your web application in order to start sending transactional email okay so with that thanks and i will see you in another video welcome back now in addition to being able to send transactional email sendgrid has a marketing section and this marketing section of links is designed to help you to use syngrid as a traditional autoresponder in fact there's an entirely different dashboard showing you results of your marketing campaigns when you use sendgrit in this way you are allowed to keep contacts in syngrid in order to send email with all the features of advanced autoresponder services including segmentation and a b testing so in the next series of videos in this course we will set up your marketing campaign using syngrid as well as delve into the advanced elements of using it we'll then take a look at factors that are going to be common with the transactional email such as statistics activity and suppressions although the logical place to start would seem to be the campaign section we're actually going to start by setting up your unsubscribe groups as that comes first we'll also cover the template section which is separate from the transactional email templates okay so with that thanks and i will see you in another video welcome back in this video we're going to start the process of working on a marketing campaigns before we do that we're going to set up unsubscribe groups in sendgrid and you won't find it in the marketing campaigns menu what you're actually going to do is scroll down to the suppressions list and you're going to click this last link that says unsubscribe groups when you get to the unsubscribe group screen what you're going to do is you're going to click create new group now what you're doing is you're going to be uploading your unsubscribe names to this section that you make sure that the people that are going to be part of your email campaign they don't get emails if they have previously said to you that they did not want to subscribe we're going to click create new group i'm going to give this group a name you can choose to make this your default group and again what's going to happen is as people unsubscribe they're going to be added to this group so that your emails from sendgrid don't go out to people that don't want them so we're going to go ahead and make this our default group and we're going to click save now what you're going to do is you're going to bring over any unsubscribe members to any previous list that you had and you want to start working with sendgrid with that list in the unsubscribe groups now if you don't have any other list that you're going to be bringing over you're going to start with zero but again if you have anyone that you're going to be bringing over you want to start by placing those individuals in this default list and we're going to do that by going to this gear and then uploading a csv file that csv file is going to have the format of having the email address in the leftmost column then first name then last name so you want to have these three columns for your csv now it's quite possible that when you bring your csv over from another service what you're going to need to do is you're going to need to switch these columns around so that they fit this format once you have it in this format you're going to save the format so you can upload it to sendgrid so you're going to come back to send grid you're going to click this gear you're going to click upload csv you're going to browse to your pc and when you upload the file it automatically imports into your unsubscribe group now obviously you can create additional groups for different purposes however we now have a default group and we can now start working with the campaigns feature inside of syngrid okay so with that thanks and i will see you in another video welcome back we're going to start the process by working with senders and so we're going to come into this left side column we're going to click the senders button and then that's going to bring you into this screen you're then going to click the create new senders button now in general when you add a sender address you want to make sure that your email address is going to match your white label domains so you're going to create this identity by starting with a name and email address in sync with the white label now if you choose not to do that then what's going to happen is they're going to need to verify your email address through a separate process but if you want to keep deliverability high you generally want to have this name and this email address to match your white label the same thing is going to be true to your reply to email address now in general this email address does not have to match your from email address however your domain should match the one that you're using in your white label you want to make sure to have your company address inside of this area you do need to have that for your canned spam act now you can give this sender profile a nickname and this is only going to be for your reference your client is not going to see this when they get your email once you have your first identity in you have a nickname for it you're then going to click save you're going to notice that the email is not yet verified so you do need to go through a verification process you should then see in your email box an email from sendgrid asking you to verify your sender identity you're going to have a link you can click inside of your email you can then come back and refresh your page and when the verification process is complete you'll have a green check mark here and you're ready then to begin sending with syngrid okay so with that thanks and i will see you in another video welcome back now when you start to use sendgrid as an autoresponder you will have contacts being held inside of the system and so if you click contacts you'll notice that you're starting with zero contacts now if you're bringing over someone from another autoresponder you're going to need to add to your list of contacts and you can do that by uploading a csv file with those contacts what you're going to see at this top right hand corner here is a button that says add contacts so we're going to do is we're going to click this drop down arrow and we're going to click upload csv file you can just add the contacts you can add them and include them in existing lists you already have on sendgrid or you can include them in a new list you're going to create on send grid so what you're going to do is you're going to click select a file to upload we're then going to click the custom fields button well then going to identify the fields now this case we have first names here so we're going to do is going to write in those first names we're now going to identify the third column which is the last name and once we've done that and we have all the fields in blue we can then click next add contacts then send grid will tell you that they're processing your contacts they will email you at your email address when the contacts are ready and then add it to your dashboard and system you should then get an email from sendgrid telling you that your contacts have been processed you can view those contacts but then you can just go back to send grid and you can start working with your new list and you should see now in your screen that your contacts have been added okay so with that thanks and i will see you in another video welcome back we are now in the campaign screen what we're going to do is go now to the campaigns link and you're going to have a button here that says create a campaign and you can either use a blank template or you can use one of the pre-existing syn grid templates in this case we're going to go ahead and start with a blank template and then we're going to click continue we can then go into the design editor but if you know coding you can use the html editor in this case we're going to go ahead and use the design editor and we're going to click continue now we're going to fill in all of the campaign settings including the campaign name who the email is going to be from the email subject the preheader and then the categories now if you want to assign your email to a specific category you want to track what you're doing in specific ways you can write one of these in it's going to be internal to you it will not be something that your client sees we're then going to move to the recipients area now if you already have segments set up you can then use those segments otherwise you can use specific lists now if you hadn't done this already you can come back to the contact list you can then click this create segment and you can give your segment a name if you want to add in certain conditions you can do that and what this will allow you to do is this will allow you to look at your list and then only send to certain people with certain conditions so what you'll see now is that we have a segment for these contacts that we can now use inside of our autoresponder so if we go back and refresh the page we should be able to come back to sendgrid and we should be able to find that we can get recipients segmented by that particular list so in this case what we're going to do is we're going to go here where it says send to and you'll see our segment there tutorial videos we're going to click that link in this case you can set an unsubscribe custom link so the individual can unsubscribe from one list as opposed to unsubscribing from all of your lists you can set that in this area in this space what you can do is you can set up a test email address so that you'll know whether or not your emails are actually making it so if you want to write in a test address here you can do that and then you can set your scheduling you can either send the email immediately or you can decide to send it later if you turn off immediately and you can give it a specific schedule in order to build the actual content you can click build you can drag in a text box and then you can begin writing your email in this area and of course you can add in any of the other modules that you'd like to add we can preview the email by clicking this button once we've done that we can then go into the advanced area now if you have html for a particular way that you want to send the email or you want it to be designed you can import that html into your template you can also add in any additional header information if you're doing a specific level of tracking so once you have everything you're going to send you can then click save draft your drafts will then be held in your campaign area ready to be sent okay so with that thanks and i will see you in another video welcome back now if you want to use one of sendgrid's existing templates in order to send your email you can do that and if you go into the campaign setting and you click create a campaign what you'll do is you will choose one of the existing templates now the blank template is going to be the default you're going to go over into the templates and you can scroll through the templates to see which one you're actually going to use now there are currently as of the recording of this video there are 12. so once you select one you can then click on it and then you'll click continue you're going to want to use the design editor and then you'll be able to click continue and we're going to do is we're going to move over into the build tab and we're going to take a look at what we can change now if we hover over any of the elements we will see boxes that we'll be able to change for example if we click inside of this box you're going to notice that there's a dialog that comes up on the left side that gives the module style we can then click edit the image and you'll notice that this is an image that we can change or that we can link out of so we have some options with this image we can go into the image library if we have already uploaded images and we can replace that image with one that we prefer so with the templates we're going to alter the things that we see when we click inside of the area in this case you'll notice we can add in our social profiles so basically what you're going to do with the template is you're going to click on the actual element you're going to work with that element so that you'll have it looking the way you want it to when you make a change that you feel as if you should stop and save what you can do and scroll all the way back up to the top and click save draft you find and feel that you don't like that design you can go back and you can create a new campaign with a new document and template the templates are all going to work the same you're going to go to the build area you can add to this template by dragging and dropping an element or you can edit the existing template so you want to work with the templates in order to give it a look or a brand that you want then add the elements that will make your campaign successful in a marketing sense okay so with that thanks and i will see you in another video welcome back in this era of privacy and gdpr you want to make sure that no one has access to your account whether they can gain access to your account and you can help that process by using two-factor authentication within send grid and if you come into your settings area and you look at the left side menu you'll see that there is a link there for two-factor authentication when you come to this screen what you'll do is you'll click add two-factor authentication now there are two options within send grid there's the authy app as well as text messages or sms the audi app is a paid application so we're not going to look at that one right now what we're going to do is we're going to look at the text message authentication and then we're going to click next what you'll need to do is you'll want to put in your mobile device number and then click next sendgrid will let you know that they have sent a code to your mobile device it's going to be a seven-digit code so you'll want to check your mobile device you'll typically then get your security code on your mobile device and then you'll want to enter that security code into sendgrid and what this means is that whenever you sign in to your sendgrid account you'll need both your password as well as a security code sent to your mobile device and that is how you will set up two-factor authentication with syngrid okay so with that thanks and i will see you in another video welcome back on your left hand side menu underneath the settings button you'll see that you actually have a two lines one will tell you how many emails you've sent and the other is called your reputation and actually the reputation will affect how deliverable your emails will be in the future and said grid will say that the only thing that can bring down your reputation will be your balanced emails and spam reports if you're using this for transactional email there really should be no reason why you shouldn't have 100 percent if you have less than 100 you do want to investigate why that would be one of the things that you can do to help if you have a case where someone may be doing a spam report is you can add unsubscribed links to the bottom of even your transactional emails so that if we go into this tracking area and the way you get to the tracking area is that you are going to go to the settings you're going to scroll down to the bottom and you're going to click tracking that's going to bring you to this page then what you're going to do is you're going to click this option you're then going to edit and you can verify that the language is sufficient in most cases the default language is going to be sufficient you're then going to click ok then you're going to turn on your unsubscribe links you'll also want to make sure that your click tracking is clicked on this will allow you to track activity if you're using transactional email you'll have a login and password and you'll have a link sometimes to the login and you'll want to track if someone is clicking those links when they get to your email you'll also want to have open tracking and then this is going to track when emails have going to be open you want to have those open if they're not open by default you want to make sure they're turned on the one other option that you have is you have the ability to add google analytics inside of your email so that you can collect even more statistics and if you want to turn this on what you'll do is you'll click edit and then what you're going to need to do is you're going to need to set up a connection with google analytics however again this is going to be optional it's not something that you're going to have to do once you're satisfied with your tracking options you can close them up and you can move on to the next section okay so with that thanks and i will see you in another video welcome back now when your sender reputation is less than 100 then you'll want to look through your suppressions because this will probably have the answer to what may be causing the problems in your account now in terms of global unsubscribes group unsubscribes and unsubscribe groups those things are going to apply primarily to your marketing campaigns so for now we're not going to pay attention to those unless you're using send grid for marketing now what you'll want to pay attention to especially if you're using sendgrid for transactional emails are going to be bounces first and this will give you an indication as to what may be happening with specific individuals that are getting emails from you for transactions you'll be given the exact time so you can go back and research the transaction you'll be given the exact reason in some cases it may be worth following up with the individual so you can make sure that they get your email or the transactional email in the future and if you have a problem and people are not getting your transactional email for a particular product you'll be able to again find out from this bounce report we can also look at spam reports again spam reports in the same way these are going to be things that individuals have stated that your transactional email is spam so in some cases you may be able to follow up with these individuals in other cases it may not be a good idea but again you'll know if you have a large number of individuals in this spam report for a particular product for a particular reason this is something that if you have a problem in your transaction system that you can fix so again spam reports will tell you specific individuals you may need to fix and again that's going to be triggered by your reputation telling you that it's less than 100 in some cases depending on how your email is sent your email may be blocked by a particular server and so what you're going to need to do is you may need to make sure to white list your own email and your own domain again you're going to want to make sure you understand the reason when the email is sent and in a number of cases this will actually show up as your email or emails that you're using you can fix this in your mail settings and by going to the address white list and making sure your domains are fixed in this mail settings area in some cases you may have a situation where individuals have placed the wrong email inside of a contact form they're then getting an invalid email so this may be a group of people that you're going to be following up with so now by going through the suppressions area you'll be able to note when and why your email may or may not be deliverable routinely and again the trigger point for this is that your reputation is less than 100 percent okay so with that thanks and i will see you in another video welcome back now in this video we want to take a look at how we would do research on specific emails and what you do is you go to this activity tab now the activity tab you have three days worth of information so in other words you retrieve information about any email that you've sent over the past three days now if you need more information than that you can purchase up to 30 days of history but you'd be using this in the most extreme cases so if you have a situation where one of the emails is showing up in your suppressions list and you want to find out more about that email you can come to this area and you can search that email you'll be able to look at all of the information about this email and you'll be given enough information to start investigating as to what happened so the activity feed is the place where you'll search over the last three days to find out what has happened with your email and where and why it's not being delivered okay so with that thanks and i will see you in another video welcome back in conclusion if your goal is to use syngrid in order to track activity with your transactional email you have a statistical area and this will give you all the information you need as to what's happening with those emails on the overview page will be given an indication of the two factors influencer deliverability as well as your reputation score which are the bounces and the spam reports there is other information available such as the geographic location of the emails that you are delivering how they are accessing your email in terms of webmail or their desktop or some other way of generating email as well as the actual mailbox provider you can see that here between gmail and outlook live you can look at specific browsers and compare their results again you will probably not be using this activity for transactional email unless there is a problem and if there is you have a handy guide to do further investigation now if you're using sendgrid for your marketing emails one thing that you'll want to note is that by going back into this section and going to the overview you're going to notice then that there are no statistics where there were statistics in the main area and that's mainly because syngrad keeps these statistics for your marketing emails separate from those you're delivering for transactions and now that you have a handle on how sendgrid works you're now ready to connect to any third-party application through the api okay so with that thanks and i will see you in another video hello and welcome you are looking at syngrid.com and we are on the inside of the dashboard and we're looking at the statistics right now if we were to go into the settings and then we would go into the mail settings and then we were to look at the event notification one of the things that was discussed in the basic course was that you can use one http post url and currently this is being used by a particular web application what the web application is is not of particular importance but it's fair to note that this web application requires that you use that web hook this web application has specific instructions on what you need to do in order to connect to syngrid and this is going to be the case when you're using grid either as an extension of your web application to send marketing email or to use for transactional email as is the case with this one called click funnels now in this course we're going to walk through the process of getting set up on a web application in particular we're going to work with wordpress and we're going to show you how to both use wordpress as membership site or as part of your blog we're also going to take a look at three helpful connections using the web application zapier we'll also take a look at some of the advanced aspects of creating new segments white labeling your domains and split testing campaigns and by the time the course is over you'll be able to set up any wordpress application with sendgrid as well as use the marketing engine to send out marketing emails okay so with that thanks and i will see you in the first video welcome back you are now looking at a website created with wordpress.com now the wordpress system sends out a number of different notifications and they send them to your inbox in some cases those notifications will be visible to you or your client and they'll be right in the box where all of your email tends to come in other cases those emails will go to inboxes or spam boxes where you might not know that it came and you might not know the contents of it now the default settings for wordpress do not give you any options in terms of changing the way you deliver your email or you'll be able to increase the likelihood that your emails will be delivered and this is why you can control the way the mail is sent through plugins like syngrid and other email senders so the next few videos we're going to show you how you can get around this factor of wordpress and ensure deliverability of those wordpress emails in addition to any third-party application that uses the wordpress system in order to send emails okay so with that thanks and i will see you in the next video welcome back you're now looking at the inside of a wordpress installation and one of the things you'll notice about this wordpress installation is that it has a membership plugin installed that membership plugin is called wishlist member and like most membership plugins it utilizes the existing system for email that's already native inside of the wordpress installation therefore when you take a membership related action such as adding a member to a specific product as we're going to do right here and we'll click go this individual would then be part of a product and they would get notification to their email address that notification would be sent by the membership plugin but it would use the existing wordpress system now the way the membership scripts work around this is to give you access to your autoresponder to connect to the membership plugin to use its email system however you still don't have a case where as soon as a person takes an action they change their password that they're going to get an email immediately and that we want to be able to rectify so in the next video we're going to start the process by installing a new plug-in so that we can bring in syngrid to help us with this problem okay so with that thanks and i will see you in another video welcome back now in this video we are going to install the sendgrid plugin before we do that we want to take a look and determine why this is going to be necessary if we go into a user's profile and we were to click this link that says send reset password link to the user we'd want to be able to hit this button and have the individual see this link and see their login and password pretty much right away so let's go ahead and click this link the problem is is that while we have the initial setup username and password we don't have a password reset that this individual is receiving that means then that we need to do something to make sure that this email is going to be delivered so we're going to start the process by clicking plugins and then we're going to click add new and we're going to write in here to send grid and we're going to click enter and search what you'll notice is that there are a couple of plugins available to us there is the sendgrid plugin and sendgrid smtp now you'll notice that this plugin says update now and that's really because this plugin has already been installed on this particular wordpress website however you'll probably see the install now button and what you'll do is you'll click that install now button so that you can activate the plugin once you've installed the plugin you can either come to the plugin section or you can do it right there on the screen you can click activate now you'll verify that that's been installed and what you'll do then is you'll go to the settings area and then you'll just verify that send grid is working by clicking send grid and then you should come into a screen that requests some information from you and then we will make this information available okay so with that thanks and i will see you in another video now by default when you have the sendgrid plugin installed you'll note that it'll say that you need swift in order to send via smtp now in most cases we're going to be working with the api but you may run into a situation with your host or in any third-party application where you may very well need to send by smtp so we're going to go ahead and we're going to find the swift plugin and we're going to install it so we're going to go to this plugin area and click add new and we get to the add new screen we're going to write in swift now typically you'll see a result here it says swift mailer if you want to write in the word mailer you can it'll come closer to the top then you can click install now once the plugin has been installed you can then click activate you'll then want to verify that swift mailer is then part of your plugin library and then when you go back to the send grid installation you'll notice then that you have a choice you can then send mail by api or you can also send by smtp and so now that you have both options we're now ready to start working with our send grid account okay so with that thanks and i will see you in another video welcome back now in the basic course we set up a brand new sendrit account however throughout the course you also saw that in the event notification area it's quite possible that you could have a very specific application for your http post url which does bring some limitations to your ascend grid account you also recall that there is a very specific two-factor authorization in order to become part of the account one thing that was not discussed is that you will have the opportunity to add teammates to a particular account giving them access to do research and make certain changes to your sendgrid account we can very easily use different api keys where we're using cent grid account even though they have multiple functions however there is a case for setting up a separate send grid account for a specific installation or specific application you're using on the web giving teammates access to certain levels of statistics as well as access to customers is a good idea as long as it's limited to those that you want them to be able to see and that's the case the sensible thing to do would be to open a separate account with separate teammates and separate reputation and access and while you can't create a second account with an email you're already using you can create as many accounts as you feel you need to in order to get the maximum deliverability and keep the data secure and so in this case we will work with the brand new account that was just created in order to work with this wordpress installation okay so with that thanks and i will see you in another video welcome back now when possible we want to be able to use our api key in order to connect to syngrid and so what we're going to do is we're going to go and get an api key from our send grid account we're going to place it inside of this dialog box and then we're going to scroll down and we're going to update our settings to save and to get that api key what we're going to do is we're going to go into the settings area we're going to click api keys and then what we're going to do is we're going to click create api key and then we're going to give full access to the key we're going to give that key a name we're going to click create and view you're going to want to have some place to put this down if you have a password manager you want to put it in there you're going to copy the link and then you're going to click done obviously for the sake of this video this api key has been blurred out so we're now going to click done and now we're going to head back to our wordpress installation once you've entered the api key in you want to make sure you've got your api dialog selected and then you're going to scroll all the way to the bottom and then you're going to click update settings now once we have the information saved what we're going to do is we're going to scroll all the way to the bottom and we're going to send a test email so we're going to write in an email i'm going to write down a subject and a body and then we're going to click send the syn grid plugin will tell us that the email has been sent we can now see the product inside of our inbox we can then open it and there is our message so now that we have the plugin installed we can send third party emails to an inbox through our wordpress installation so we want to do now is look at our transactional templates okay so with that thanks and i will see you in another video welcome back now the sendgrid plugin will allow you to use the transactional templates that we discussed in the basic course without custom coding what we'll need in order to use those templates is the template id and so we'll come into our account we will click transactional template and you'll notice that there is an id that we can use then inside of our plugin so for the sake of this process we will create a new template we'll give that template a name and then we'll click save we'll then add a version of the template we will use the design editor and then click continue so we're going to create our template settings we're then going to save a template and then we're going to go to the build area so we've now built our template we're now going to click save i'm going to go back outside of the templates now what we're going to do is to get our template id and we're going to head back to our wordpress installation we are going to enter our template id we're then going to update our settings and then we're going to send another test email once we have our test email written we're then going to click send send grid will alert us that our email was sent so in opening up our email you'll notice all of the elements from our template so this means then that all you'll need to do is to customize your template you'll want to make sure it looks the way you want you can go back and make changes once you've seen the test and then you'll be able to use it in all of your transactional email okay so with that thanks and i will see you in another video hello welcome now in this video we're going to be discussing white labeling and if you were looking at the email if we were to open up the details what you'll notice is that even though this email is being sent through sendgrid we actually have our domain and you'll see that these are the domains that we set up through sendgrid and again sendgrid does this so that it will increase the opportunity for us to make sure that our emails are going to inbox and we went through the white labeling process what we did was we took the information that we were given and we took this information and we went back to the host and we asked them to install these in the right places however it's possible that your host will not do this service for you so you're going to have to make sure to do this yourself and you're going to need to do it through your cpanel hosting or your subtaculous hosting so now that we have this information visible we're going to walk back through the same process as if we needed to put this information into our host without the use of virtual private server so the first thing we would do is to go back to our cpanel hosting or subtaculous hosting now what you're going to do when you're inside of cpanel is you're going to come down into the zone editor you'll see that right here once you click the zone editor what you're going to do is you're going to click cname record now you have two dialog boxes name and cname now in all three cases the name is going to be this host and you want to copy and paste this you don't want to try to write this down because it has to be exact the cname is going to be the data so again what you want to do is you want to copy these into the cname dialog box now because this has already been added we're not going to add this for the sake of this video but this is what you would have in each instance as you add it to your zone editor once you've added all three then what you're going to do is you're going to look to go through the validation process again this one is already done but what you're going to do is click this validate record button and then that's going to tell you whether or not your content the dialog boxes has been validated and once it has you are then ready to begin sending with syngrid okay so with that thanks and i will see you in another video welcome back if you have ever read a marketing email you'll notice that many of the links are going to be tracked with a tracking link and we can tell it's a tracking link if we hover over the link you'll see at the very bottom of this video a tracking link if we hover over any of the links you'll see an individual url designed to track the clicks now send grid gives you the ability to control how that link's going to appear inside of your email so for example we click this add white label syngrid will actually tell you what the email link white label does it increases deliverability because those links are then changed to something that looks like your domain that's why you want them to be white labeled as your domain was if we go inside of this link we click the view button what we'll notice is that there is a hostname and a data name and you don't have your host doing this work for you you are going to need to have this information placed inside your dns and you do that in the very same way using the zone editor again the host column is going to be the name the data column is going to be the cname so what you're going to do with each row is you're going to put this information into your cpanel as a cname record and then you're going to come back hit the validate record button so that you'll confirm that your links are then valid once they are validated you are then ready to begin sending with sid grid okay so with that thanks and i will see you in another video welcome back we can use the sendgrid plugin to collect names and email addresses into our sendgrid autoresponder with some of the features we've seen so look closer we'll go into the settings now go into send grid and this time instead of looking solely at the general area we are going to go over to the subscription widget we go over to that subscription widget what we're going to need is the api key from our sendgrid account so we're going to go into our settings we're going to get our api keys we're going to create an api key we're going to give that key full access and then we're going to create the api key we're now going to copy the key it's obviously blurred out for the sake of this video and then we're going to click done now that we have our api key we're going to head back to our wordpress installation and we're going to add our api key into this dialog box we'll then determine if we want the first and last name fields and for them to be required we can either leave these checked or unchecked whatever is our preference you'll see that we've got default emails that are already set up and once we have everything here we can then click update settings what we're going to do then is going to go to our appearance we're then going to go to the widget section go to the widgets section you'll notice that we have a widget area and we have a syngrid subscription widget and for the sake of this video we're just going to pull that subscription widget all the way to the top of our wordpress site and we're just going to use the default settings we're going to do now is we're going to look at our site with the new subscription widget and what you see now is that we have our subscription widget here on the page and we can begin collecting names and email addresses into our send grid account so that we can begin using it for marketing email okay so with that thanks and i will see you in another video welcome back now if you are already using wordpress it's possible that you'll want to move some of the users that are already part of your site into your new autoresponder and to do that you're going to need to export them into a csv file now the export command in wordpress only exports content so in order to export users we're going to need to find a plugin so we're going to go to add new plugin we're then going to write in export users and then there's a plugin here called export users to csv we will be able to use that we're going to click install now we're then going to click activate we're then going to come into our users category we're then going to highlight those users that we want to export in our list then we're going to click export users then you'll notice now that we now have users available to export we're going to click users we're going to in this case export all of the roles we're going to have a start date and an end date and then we're going to click download export file now in order to use for send grid we're going to need to have our content in a certain format and that means then we're going to have to delete some of the columns now once we've cleaned up our csv we'll be able to use our email address first name and last name we can then save the file and then we can head on to send grid we're then going to go to our contacts we're then going to click add contacts we're going to upload our csv we're going to grab that csv from our hard drive we're then going to go to our custom fields if your fields are all assigned then you are ready to go to the next step now once your list is complete you'll have all of your contacts then inside of syngrid you will then be ready to begin sending to these individuals okay so with that thanks and i will see you in another video what you're going to be able to do now is you're going to be able to create segments as we did in the basic course and we're going to start by clicking create segment and we're going to give our segment a name now this time we're going to add a condition and then we're going to click save segment so we now have one segment we can create a second segment we can add a different condition and then we'll click save segment we now have our second segment so now what you're able to do within campaigns is you're able to use different segments based on different characteristics of particular names on your contact list okay so with that thanks and i will see you in another video hello welcome now this video we're going to start the process of working through split tests and we're going to start by clicking the campaigns button and we're going to click create a campaign we're going to use the blank template and then click continue i'm going to click the design editor and then click continue we're going to give our campaign a name once we have our basic campaign settings we're going to save then we're going to click this fourth tab and it's going to be the a b testing tab what we're going to do is we're going to turn on a b testing in this case we're going to test the subject line so we're going to vary the subject line and then we're going to determine which version wins so we can determine that the email that has the highest open rate that'll be the winner or the click rate or the manual rate now for this email we're going to choose the open rate and then we're going to click save draft once we complete the look of the email as well as the tags we are then ready to send this campaign so we're going to do is we're going to go back to the recipients we're going to send to specific segments particularly we're going to send to the admin segment and we're going to use our general unsubscribe group finally we can choose to send our email immediately or we can choose to send one when we schedule it but we are now ready to begin testing our email for the subject line using open rate as a criteria for determining which one did best okay so with that thanks and i will see you in another video welcome back now there are other aspects to a b testing inside of syngrid and we're still inside of the email that we are split testing and if you look at the test type the second kind of test you can run is if you vary the content and when you vary the content you can determine how many versions you're going to have so example if you want to have four different versions of the content and then you're going to have a certain percentage of the emails going to each one of these size segments when you do that what's going to happen is you're going to see the segments show up here at the top and so you have segment a open where you're going to put your content then click on segment b and you'd put content in segment b you would then put your content in segment c then you'd put content in segment d you can also vary the sample size so example if you wanted to have all one hundred percent of the emails in a certain segment delivered and part of the test you can move this up to ninety percent and basically you're going to have all four segments adding up to 90 the winning version is going to be 10. you can run the test for a certain period of time when you're doing a content test you can make it for 24 hours if you want basically you have a way of determining and tracking whether or not one email did better than another of course what you're going to want to do is you're going to want to vary the links that you have in here that people are clicking so you'll know which email sent the effective traffic okay so with that thanks and i will see you in another video welcome back sin grid can extend even further than wordpress when you consider that you can integrate it with a third-party app called zapier zapier combines two web applications that typically don't have a direct integration to do things that will be common practices in both apps so for example if we write in the name syngrid we've already done that here so that we can look to find out which applications actually work with syngrid and you'll notice that there are applications with google sheets facebook mailchimp and others now if you currently don't have a zapier account you can go to google and you can search for zen grid integrations with zapier and if you go inside of that link you'll be able to see at a glance all of the applications that integrate with syngrid and you'll see here that we can scroll through them fairly quickly and get a sense for which ones we can use in our existing business there are three in particular that we are going to explore sendgrid and paypal syngrid and surveymonkey and sendgrid and shopify now obviously you can explore the app further to find out which integrations you can use along with syngrid okay so with that thanks and i will see you in another video welcome back now you can do a limited number of applications with zapier as long as they don't have the premium logo you can use them as part of the free plan so as you begin to look for applications that work with sendgrid if you see the premium sign you may want to go ahead and subscribe if not you can set up the zap and then you can determine how often you're going to be using it in this case the second app we're going to be looking for is going to be paypal and it's a premium app so we're going to click paypal and what you'll notice is that there's one connection between sendgrid and paypal so assuming that you have either a trial of zapier or you have the 15 level you can click use this zap now the connection is that you make a sale through paypal and what you want to do is then you want to have an email sent to them through sendgrid and so we can do that through zapier so what we're going to do first is we're going to click create this zap and we're going to start by connecting to paypal now for the sake of testing we're going to click silent mode and we're going to copy this zapier web hook to our clipboard i'm going to continue forward and what we need to do now is we need to place this url inside of paypal now the web hook is going to go into your instant payment notification settings inside of paypal so what you're going to do then is once you have placed it inside the dialog box you'll then click save you'll then want to click fetch and continue you should be able to have a successful test you'll then click continue and so now we'll need to connect to send grid so we'll click continue we'll now connect our sendgrid account once you have your sample information in you can then click continue you can then send your test to sendgrid once you have a successful test you can then click finish and then your zap will be turned on so what you've set up is that when you have a successful test at paypal you can then have that you can then have an email sent to the individual through zapier through sendgrid okay so with that thanks and i will see you in another video welcome back now in this video we're going to talk about a helpful connection between syngrid and surveymonkey and basically what you'll be allowed to do once you connect the two applications is to send an email for every new response on surveymonkey so to get started we're going to click use this zap once we have selected syngrid and surveymonkey and basically this is a way of thanking the individuals that actually took the survey so we're going to click create this zap and we're going to start with a survey monkey trigger so in other words a survey answer from surveymonkey is going to be the thing to set the zap in motion we're going to click continue and then we're going to connect our surveymonkey account we're going to authorize surveymonkey and zapier and we are already logged into surveymonkey to make it easier so once we have our surveymonkey account connected we're then going to click save and continue and now we're going to select a survey and we're going to select one of our available surveys what we're going to do now is we're going to click continue and then we're going to click fetch and continue what we're going to do now is we're going to click send grid action and click send email we're going to use our existing connected syn grid account we're going to click save and continue and now we're going to set up the email once we have our answers we'll then click continue and then we'll send the test to send grid and once we have a successful test we can then click finish in order to activate this you will need a paid plan of surveymonkey okay so with that thanks and i will see you in another video now you can also connect sendgrid to shopify although you don't have a direct connection through shopify you can connect through zapier and so to get started we're going to click use this zap and basically when a customer makes a purchase on your shopify store zapier is going to send that customer a transactional email so we're going to do is click create this zap we're then going to click the shopify trigger and we're now going to connect our shopify account we're going to connect our store and then click continue shopify will then tell you that they are about to install the app for zapier and then your shopify store will be connected you'll then click save and continue you'll then be setting up a shopify paid order you'll then click continue now if you're testing and you don't have an existing paid order you may need to skip this step but we're now going to click fetch and continue so because we're in the testing phase we're going to skip the test and continue we're now going to click continue and then we're going to set up our send grid so we're going to click continue we have our existing sid grid account so we're now going to click save and continue so once you have the test information in you're then going to scroll down and click continue and then you'll send the final test to send grid once your email has been successfully sent you can then click finish and then your zap will be turned on and every time that you make a sale from your shopify store the individual will be sent an email through zapier from sendgrid okay so with that thanks and i will see you in another video in conclusion in this course we worked extensively with wordpress as well as a membership site within wordpress called wishlist member now most of the features of wishlist member will exist in any wordpress-based membership script we also looked at the send grid connection to the web-based app click funnels which connects through smtp instead of the api as it does through wordpress we also through zapier connected to a shopify ecommerce platform to send transactional email we discovered that there is a way for you to build your list using wordpress and send grid without having to know any coding now it's quite possible that you may want to use a different kind of membership script such as the one called a member which depends on php and html and that's the case a connection to sendgrid is through the api and it's very simple as you can see here on screen and you are now ready to use syngrid in any way to connect whether you want to connect through wordpress cloud-based or an html setting okay so with that thanks and i'll see you either in another video or in another course [Music] so

Channel: Scott D. Clary - Success Story Podcast

Views: 14,657

Keywords: sendgrid, sendgrid tutorial, sendgrid api tutorial, sendgrid api, tutorial, php tutorial for beginners, sendgrid email, twilio sendgrid, sendgrid email marketing tutorial, how to use stripe - tutorial for beginners, sendgrid send email, sendgrid node tutorial, sendgrid csharp tutorial, php tutorial for beginners full, python smtp tutorial for beginners, email marketing tutorial for beginners, sendgrid (business operation), php for beginners, php tutorial, how to use sendgrid

Id: B-CL4IEty74

Length: 88min 9sec (5289 seconds)

Published: Sat Feb 06 2021