Creating automated emails with updating values

[Dallenback9]

Hi, 

I'm working with an education provider who adds new videos for subscribers about every week. We're looking for a way we can automate this process. We have a list of active subscribers and thought we could use a workflow to send an automated email that would be in the same format etc. every week. 

But we're running into a problem on what properties to use and if it's possible to do so. Ideally, it would look something like this, 

Hi [First Name],

New videos have been uploaded:

[Video Title 1]: [Video URL 1]

[Video Title 2]: [Video URL 2]

Thanks, 

Company name

The problem is that we aren't sure how to update these new properties so that they can change each week. Our developer can send a property value over, but how can we update the property to the new value?

For instance, Developer updates a value to Test Contact for [Video Title 1]. Is there way to copy Test Contact's VALUE for [Video Title 1] into that same property for a specified list? 

Or does anyone have a better way to do this? I've had no luck with this method or through Ticket Properties either and wondering if I'm missing an easy solution. 

Thanks, 

Dallen

[karstenkoehler]

Good thinking, @Crystal_Hopper. Have you done this before? The risk that I see here however would be that embedded elements can be considered a security risk by email service providers and email clients.

[Crystal_Hopper]

@Dallenback9 here's another thought. In the LMS, is there an existing, or can you create a "New Content in the Last 10 Days" view? If you could embed a "new content" view in your automated email, then it would always be updated no matter how many vidoes were uploaded and there should be no other action required except uploading content. If the LMS could produce a nice view that included thumbnails, links, titles and short description, then that would be less coding for you to figure out. 

If you can create and embed a View, then you could further clone and filter it to provide alternate views for special content or particular audiences.

[Dallenback9]

@Aakar Sorry, I probably didn't do the best at explaining it, I'll try to simplify it a little bit. 

The client has a learning platform with paid subscribers. New content is added regularly. Once a week we wanted to send an email to these subscribers about new videos that are uploaded. Since we'll do it every week and the number of videos and URLs will be different, we were looking at automating these emails. 

Sometimes the provider uploads several (or a dozen or more) videos in a week so we didn't want an email to go out for each one. We were looking for a way to use HubSpot to help out with this process. 

Right now we're thinking of using an email template and updating the links every week. It's a lot faster than manual but if there were a way to automate that too it would be a big help over time. I think @karstenkoehler may be right about using some kind of middleware if we wanted to achieve this, I couldn't find any properties that work in this method. 

[Dallenback9]

HI @karstenkoehler ,

Sorry, that was one of the workarounds we tried. The problem is that our server is limited and we have a lot of subscribers and our Developer believes it will be too many requests to send updated values for all of those properties for every subscriber. 

Instead, he wants to be able to update all of the properties once and then have HubSpot pull the value for the updated properties and use them in an email. So the Developer could update the values for [Video Title 1]

in one place and we would be able to send an email with the correct value out to the customers. 

We tried using a Contact property but couldn't find a way to update it automatically for everyone on the list. 

I'm not sure the blog subscription option would work since we use a plugin to manage the content and quizzes etc on the website. 

[Aakar]

Hi @Dallenback9 

I didn't quite get the context. 

Who is your target audience? Have you already got the list of subscribers (segmented contacts) who will be getting these emails? If you have got a list of contacts, then you might want to create a custom contact property (with video title value or something similar which can be updated via workflows) or just use delay in the workflows. 

[karstenkoehler]

Hi @Dallenback9,

In that case you would probably have to work with some kind of middleware, essentially moving the capacity problem from one solution to another. The question really is whether that makes a lot of sense if bulk editing could just as well be executed from right within HubSpot? Does it make sense to have a developer edit this information in one system and integrating that system with a middleware instead of adding the new information about a few videos right within HubSpot? That's probably the route I would go.

Best regards!

[karstenkoehler]

Hey @Dallenback9,

Could you specify / rephrase this part?

---

@Dallenback9 wrote:

For instance, Developer updates a value to Test Contact for [Video Title 1]. Is there way to copy Test Contact's VALUE for [Video Title 1] into that same property for a specified list? 

---

If a developer can update the values for...

[Video Title 1]: [Video URL 1]

[Video Title 2]: [Video URL 2]

... then you can have a workflow wait for this property update and trigger an automated email based on that. To enroll a contact based on a change in value, you need to select that property as an enrollment trigger in your workflow (e.g. Video Title 1 is known) and also choose it for re-enrollment. I'd start this workflow with a 15 minute delay to make sure Video Title 2 etc. can also be populated by the developer.

As far as other entirely different approaches go, you could look into blog subscription emails. Once new content is published on the blog, these emails can be sent immediately. There is also always the manual route which I assume you're trying to avoid but which could make sense up to a certain volume of new videos.

Best regards!