IT:BD:Marketing/Transactional Email/Rules Engine
Summary
You'll need some kind of rule engine to trigger the automated emails.
Design Considerations
At present, I don't know of any hosted solution for this part.
Integration With External Services
Assuming you're not building everything yourself, you'll be using services hosted in the cloud (payment systems, support systems) as well as providing a service yourself.
These systems need to programmed to callback API endpoints on your servers to process them.
Frankly, this is the pain part, having to study the API's of all those external services, and test them. There's just no two ways around it.
Examples of events you want to be signalled from external services are:
- Billing:
- Purchase completed
- Support:
- Support ticket raised
- Support ticket answered
- Marketing:
- Social media mention
- etc.
Database Scans
In addition, you'll want to do periodic scans of your databases to glean insight into the usage of your software. Including.
- Time since last signed in (time to re-engage somehow?)
- Have they tried feature X? (do they know about it, and should we send a tip email?)
Other information to find ways of automating are:
- Coming up to subscription end…time to schmooze?
- Many support tickets? Are we going to lose the person? Before we do…what can we do to improve services to keep them?