Is there an email service that queries your own database for users?

Question

Is there an email service that allows you to nicely query your own database to create the recipients list? The issue is that we do tons of specialized user segmentation to create lists of recipients. Trying to keep our database in sync with the email-service's database is risky and fraught with potential issues since user data will be updated frequently in multiple ways. But we still need the powerful features of a service like SendGrid or Mailchimp where such as A/B testing, open & click-rate reporting, WYSIWYG template design, etc.

My pipe dream is to have a service like Sendgrid or Mailchimp, but when it asks you who to send the email to, you specify parameters that you've created yourself. It sends these parameters to your server, and your server (using a little code that you've custom-written), performs a query on your user database and sends the recipient list back.

Does such a service exist?

Answer 1

You can do this with SendGrid, by specifying an external URL as your recipients input method.

When specifying the external URL you may select "Activate Dynamic Mode". Dynamic mode checks the URL when a Marketing Email is scheduled/sent, and updates the list accordingly.

Knowing this, you could specify an external URL whose parameters control a database query. This database query would eventually resolve to a CSV which SendGrid would process at send time. Thus removing the need to keep two databases in sync.

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N.B. Dynamic mode has been known to have some problems if you specify additional columns in your csv (beyond name,email). This is slated to be fixed, however, as of this answer it has not been. If you create the list at send time, this problem will not occur.