Rapid Fire Emails in a Knack Database App

Here I show you a method of sending emails directly from a Knack database app. It allows you to select different email templates and keep a history of what was sent, who sent it, and capture the date. It a works well without custom code or integrations with other email systems. I take you though one Knack app use case, but I am sure there are lots of them where this would apply. Thanks!

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Full Transcript of this Knack Database App Post

1:14 The vet needs to sign waivers they have to determine if they need, wheelchairs or not, a whole number of things.

1:23 It's a process. So this, a volunteer is coordinating with, in this case, the vet to get this stuff done. And so we have a whole list here and it's in the, they're checking them off.

1:37 If they're done, have the white waivers been signed? All this is done within that. But there's also a number of emails that go out and we set up this functionality.

1:46 They didn't want to do bulky medals. They wanted the volunteer to have control over what was going on. Cause this is quite a fluid thing.

1:53 People sign up and they have to leave cause they're sick or whatever. So we made this functionality. We have several different types of emails.

2:01 If it's a vet, there's these three types. If it's a guardian, there's some other types. And what this does is say, hey, it lets them choose cause we've set up an email template what email they want to go out.

2:14 And then they press send and then it keeps a log of who sent it and when and what type of.

2:21 V mail it was, and then there's a little code here that said travel that travel document. This little thing here, they can see what emails have already sent out so they can help manage it know where they are.

2:37 I'm going to show you how we put this together. Thanks.

0:00 Okay, let's get going on how you can send out templated emails Which couple clicks of a button or click of a button and keep a log of what it's sent out again This works for email templates. 0:11 You could also probably put in a if you wanted the body of an email to be Variable your own content you could have a paragraph Add a paragraph field in there and capture something you write off hand Let's go for it. 0:30 The back end. To do this now we have a veteran Now I did email type here. I could have had in the email log. 0:37 We need this thing. Email type and email log is connected to the veteran. One to many. Veteran can have many email logs and the connection field resides in the email. 0:51 So notice I made a separate table for type. It could have been a multiple choice here, but I wanted to collect some other information. 1:02 Namely, look at this target. This is either it's going to the vet or the guardian. That's because depending on who you're dealing with, when you pop up that email, it's going to be filtered by one or the other. 1:17 There's a code when I showed you so we can display what was already sent out short because it's in a column and then the order. 1:27 For example, this is an eight week one, a seven week. We want eight to come before seven. So I put an order number so I can tell it to sort based on those and this other variable information to the type you can't do with it. 1:42 Regular multiple choice. So let's go over to where we are in the app. How we built this out. Here's that form that popped up. 1:51 Who the veteran is when you want to send me on. You choose what type here. This one is filtered by target is that. 2:03 Let's keep going here. You submit it. And here's what happens when you submit it. There's a record rule. It grabs who did it. 2:16 Now what this form is, it's created a new log. A new email log. So it will capture the date. In order to click submit, it's going to capture that. 2:26 That keeps the log. But what it also does is when you create a new log, we're going to tell it to send out an email. 2:34 So here are these three different emails. When the email type selected is this eight week email. Now, the email from is not variable. 2:46 It's going to be static. This is what it is. Just a note. Whatever you put in here, it's going to come from. 2:53 You can't say, well, put it to this other person, like a variable field here. You're going to send it to the vet. 2:59 And then we got their information. Here of what this content of this email is. And this is the one that goes out. 3:08 Let me go back one here. That logo I showed you. Just a note on that. When you put a logo in there, that rich tech, rich text field, it's going to ask for a URL. 3:21 You just. Don't put an image and you can host it someplace in your Google drive and get the URL from there. 3:28 I usually just put them right in the app. I make a thing called image and then you upload an image and you click on this and then click here. 3:39 It's going to open up. This is an Amazon Amazon server. You can grab that URL and put it in there. 3:46 What else we got? So this works really well. One thing for another, this is a different topic a little bit. 3:56 This is all native functionality. There's nothing going on with code or make or anything. But I had another app, a similar thing. 4:04 We had a man, it was a school. We had to send communications out to parents, to kids. The class got rained out. 4:10 It was something outdoor, all kinds of things. And the robustness of what I'm showing you wasn't, it wasn't working there. 4:19 And we brought in Andy O'Neil, if you know, Al Hymn from Ablytica, top notch integration guy. He built out this thing using Make and Twilio, if you know what that is. 4:42 And then allows responding back to it. And you can make the from variable, or you can do a number of things. 4:48 It's pretty slick. But that's what I got for this one. How to do quick emails, especially when they're based on templates.

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