Oh Dear is the all-in-one monitoring tool for your entire website. We monitor uptime, SSL certificates, broken links, scheduled tasks and more. You'll get a notifications for us when something's wrong. All that paired with a developer friendly API and kick-ass documentation. O, and you'll also be able to create a public status page under a minute. Start monitoring using our free trial now.

Video: a first look at the alpha version of Mailcoach

Original – by Freek Van der Herten – 3 minute read

My team and I are currently working on Mailcoach, a self-hosted solution to easily send out newsletters and e-mail campaigns. In this video you'll get a preview of an alpha version of the package.

Currently, the UI is a bit rough around the edges. When we release it, it will all be very polished. And yes, before sending out a campaign, we'll add a beautiful confirmation screen, so you don't accidentally send it out.

You might wonder why we are building this. Some of the well-known newsletter marketing services can cost quite a lot when your e-mail list grows. Some charge $99 a month for a list that has a few thousand subscribers.

Mailcoach will leverage e-mail sending services like Amazon SES, Mailgun and SendGrid to send out e-mails. These services only charge a couple of dollars for tens of thousands of e-mails. And yes, in addition to transaction mails, these services allow marketing e-mails to be sent as long as you take care of your reputation. The number of bounces and received complaints must be kept low.

Mailcoach can help you with keeping a good reputation. Out of the box, it'll offer an easy to use double opt-in process, so you know for sure that everybody on the list actually subscribed. Mailcoach can also handle bounces. When an e-mail to a subscriber bounces, the subscriber will be automatically unsubscribed.

Our package can also leverage the open and click tracking offered by the e-mail services. In the Mailcoach UI, you can see individual opens, clicks, unsubscribes, and bounces. It'll also calculate open and click rates.

We're building it as a Laravel package that you can install in your own app. Mailcoach sends out a lot of useful events such as CampaignMailOpened, CampaignLinkClicked, ... When installed into a Laravel app, you can leverage these events to build any flow you want. Want to send another e-mail to the subscriber if he or she clicked three links in the campaign. Easy!

In addition to the package, we'll also release a stand-alone version that can be easily installed on any server that meets the requirements (modern PHP version, Redis, MySQL). This is an excellent solution for people that don't have PHP or Laravel knowledge. Under the hood, this stand-alone app will use the laravel-mailcoach package.

We will also release a video course on Mailcoach. It'll contain videos on how to use the UI and the code. If you're into Laravel, you'll be happy to know that we'll also include videos on how the package works under the hood and how we've built it. I'm pretty sure every Artisan can learn something from this.

We've tested out Mailcoach quite a bit already. The first real-world test will happen this weekend. I'll be using Mailcoach to send out my newsletter to a list that contains 6000+ subscribers.

I can't give an exact release date of Mailcoach just yet, but my educated guess is: within the next two or three months. We've put a lot of work into this, and we're still thinking about how we should price all this. One thing you can be sure of is that it will be way cheaper than the total cost of the traditional e-mail marketing services.

To stay in the loop of Mailcoach, subscribe at our mailinglist. If you have questions about this project, contact me on Twitter.

Stay up to date with all things Laravel, PHP, and JavaScript.

You can follow me on these platforms:

On all these platforms, regularly share programming tips, and what I myself have learned in ongoing projects.

Every month I send out a newsletter containing lots of interesting stuff for the modern PHP developer.

Expect quick tips & tricks, interesting tutorials, opinions and packages. Because I work with Laravel every day there is an emphasis on that framework.

Rest assured that I will only use your email address to send you the newsletter and will not use it for any other purposes.

Comments

What are your thoughts on "Video: a first look at the alpha version of Mailcoach"?

Comments powered by Laravel Comments
Want to join the conversation? Log in or create an account to post a comment.

Webmentions

Mozammil liked on 30th November 2019
Enzo Notario liked on 30th November 2019
Filipe liked on 30th November 2019
Karl Monson liked on 29th November 2019
Joey Kudish liked on 29th November 2019
Bruno CHIREZ liked on 29th November 2019
Rias Van der Veken retweeted on 29th November 2019
Rias Van der Veken liked on 29th November 2019
Wyatt liked on 29th November 2019
Hayk D liked on 29th November 2019
Spatie retweeted on 29th November 2019
SimFarming liked on 29th November 2019
oluwajubelo loves VueJS ? retweeted on 29th November 2019
oluwajubelo loves VueJS ? liked on 29th November 2019
Christian Klemp liked on 29th November 2019
Jino Antony liked on 29th November 2019
이현석 Hyunseok Lee liked on 29th November 2019
Simon liked on 29th November 2019
Rafa Alcántara liked on 29th November 2019
Helder Willian liked on 28th November 2019
Daniele Esposito liked on 28th November 2019
Ahmed Ashraf ?‍? ? ? liked on 28th November 2019
Oliver Davies liked on 28th November 2019
Mickaël Isaert liked on 28th November 2019
Sebastian De Deyne retweeted on 28th November 2019
Neil Keena retweeted on 28th November 2019
Neil Keena liked on 28th November 2019
Steve McDougall liked on 28th November 2019
Freek Van der Herten replied on 28th November 2019
Yup
Manojkiran liked on 28th November 2019
Andre Madarang liked on 28th November 2019
Manojkiran retweeted on 28th November 2019
Pascal van Gemert liked on 28th November 2019
Fred Carlsen liked on 28th November 2019
brian replied on 28th November 2019
Will it come with a easy upfront default drop in form / endpoint to start and allow overriding methods of an extended controller? Kind of like the auth controllers
Řäśhīđ Ãļí liked on 28th November 2019
Wyatt liked on 28th November 2019
Christian Leo-Pernold liked on 28th November 2019
Jimmy Lipham liked on 28th November 2019
Chris Fidao liked on 28th November 2019
Erick Patrick retweeted on 28th November 2019
JΞRRΞD liked on 28th November 2019
Linka Softwares liked on 28th November 2019
Russell Brown liked on 28th November 2019
Mithicher Baro liked on 28th November 2019
Simon Depelchin liked on 28th November 2019
Mithicher Baro retweeted on 28th November 2019
Russell Brown retweeted on 28th November 2019
Jan Östlund replied on 28th November 2019
Do you have any hint of how good is the delivery-rate (not ending up in spam) for supported services compared to MailChimp? Which one do you recommend?
MegaMaker retweeted on 28th November 2019
Jan Östlund liked on 28th November 2019
Ante Sepic liked on 28th November 2019
MegaMaker liked on 28th November 2019
Freek Van der Herten replied on 28th November 2019
I didn't do research on that. I've used both SES and Mailgun and they seem to perform equally when sending out my newsletter.
Ante Sepic retweeted on 28th November 2019
PHP Synopsis retweeted on 28th November 2019
José Cage liked on 28th November 2019
Swapnil Bhavsar liked on 28th November 2019
Günther Debrauwer liked on 28th November 2019
Sumon Molla Selim liked on 28th November 2019
Renato Alves replied on 28th November 2019
Or only the click count will be recorded?
Azerdaoui Othmane liked on 28th November 2019
Dries Vints retweeted on 28th November 2019
Paul Macgregor liked on 28th November 2019
Robin Dirksen liked on 28th November 2019
Freek Van der Herten replied on 28th November 2019
The opens and bounces will also be recorded
Zubair Mohsin liked on 28th November 2019
Freek Van der Herten replied on 28th November 2019
Not by default because I feel not a lot of people need to know this. Some email providers do send that info. We save all the webhook content in the db, so you might customize mailcoach to display it.
Renato Alves replied on 28th November 2019
Question from the video. Will there be a way to see "where" the click came from? In case there is a CTA in two places.
Christoph Rumpel ? liked on 28th November 2019