Implementing custom emails on your Tangram app

Summary:

This guide explains how to manage and customize emails in your Tangram app. It covers three main areas: default emails, basic customization, and fully custom email setups.

Default Emails

• Log in as an admin, click the wrench icon, go to Settings > Notifications.
• Ensure the email field is set to an address you actively monitor for system emails.
• Enable or disable system notifications via a checkbox.
• Default notifications are platform-agnostic and cannot be customized beyond basic text.

Transactional Emails

• Access Manage Transactional Emails to view a table of emails triggered by platform actions like bookings.
• Customize the subject and body text, and enable/disable specific emails.
• Use variables to dynamically insert user-specific information.
• These emails support only plain text, not HTML or custom designs.

Fully Custom Email Setup

• To implement custom email notifications, use external platforms like Zapier or Make.com through webhooks.
• Go to Settings > Webhooks, create a webhook for desired event types (e.g., transactions or listing creation), and connect it to a service like Zapier.
• Example: Connect Tangram with Zapier to trigger emails via MailChimp, MailerLite, Brevo, or other platforms.
• Platforms like Make.com offer similar automation and integrations, often with generous free tiers.

Additional Tips

• Be cautious with email setup to avoid formatting or propagation delays.
• Tools like Zapier and Make.com simplify integrations, but direct integrations with platforms may also be an option.

If you have questions, feel free to ask at support@tangram.co

Video Transcription:

" Hey everyone, this is going to be a guide on how to deal with emails in your Tangram app. I'm just going to cover the basics of what the default emails look like, how to customize what you can customize in the Tangerine map, and then how you can further extend emails once you get a bit further along and want to do a fully custom setup.

The first thing is you want to log in as an admin to your platform and then click the wrench icon and then click the settings tab. From here, you want to go to notifications. And make sure this email is set, first of all. The email here is important for getting reply tos and stuff and making sure we can send you system emails where that's relevant.

Make sure this email is set to something that you're actually checking. The second thing is we have this check box to send that enables or disables system notifications.  What that's referring to is stuff like when a booking happens and the admin gets notified. stuff like when a message is sent, and the user receiving it gets notified.

These messages are important to have, but not related to transactions.  You can't customize them. But so the two options you have are one, you can check this box, and it will send the tank, the Tangram default version, which is the version we've just written to convey the basic information in a platform agnostic way.

Or you can disable this and then build a custom Email integration, which I'll show you later in this video. And that will allow you to customize the body of the email and stuff. But the downside is that that takes a bit more effort and it's a bit more involved.  I'll talk a bit more about why you may or may not want to do that later.

But I'd recommend if you're just starting out, just check that box or leave it checked if it's already checked. And then the third thing is manage transactional emails here.  If I click on that, what you'll see in this menu is a table of all of the emails sent when transactions on your platform happen.

What those rows look like exactly will vary platform to platform, but you'll see generally one email for the admin, one for the person making the booking and one for the person who created the listing that the booking is relevant to.  If I click edit on any of these, I have the ability to change the subject, the body and disable the email.

The variables you see here are going to be pulled from, are going to be dynamically filled with the information for the user. And if you click on a field, it'll give you the option to add those variables in again.  If I click click this platform name button. Now the platform name is going to get out of there, which I don't want.

I'm going to just delete that. But you can customize these in any way you'd like and then hit save. And then they'll, they'll persist within your app.  I would recommend doing that if you just want to make some slight tweaks to the notifications. Like, for example, you don't want the word listings to be used.

Maybe you want to replace that with something more relevant to your industry or platform. That would be one thing you would might want to. customize within these notifications. The limitation of this is that for the default notifications, the only thing you can customize is the plain text in them.

You can't use custom HTML or designs within the system emails.  If you want to have custom notifications, you have to integrate with an external platform that lets you send them with Tangram. So the way that you would go about that is. you would go to settings and then the webhooks tab.  If you're not familiar with webhooks, generally what they refer to is it's a way for your application to communicate with an external system.

You could trigger webhooks when all of these different event types happen on your platform. Let's say like, if I want to do when a, when a transaction is created, I would click transactions and say, we'll call it transaction created. And then the webhook URL is the service that you're connecting the webhook to.

And you'd want to trigger this when a transaction is created. And then you would choose a listing type. This platform only has one, so it just triggers for listings.  In this case, what this webhook would do if I created it would be, when a transaction is created, it will send the data for that transaction to The URL that I put here.

I'm actually going to pause the video and make a test web hook transaction just to show you what that looks like.  Now I'm in Zapier, which is a a pretty popular automation tool. And I'm going to connect to the web hook from the platform. I just showed in this video to show what this will look like.

The first thing is I want to create a new zap, so we'll go to create. And. I'm going to create a trigger when a webhook is received.  I search for webhooks and it shows up there. You'll want to use, we'll, we'll try catch raw hook first. And we'll test that. And as you can see, when you click, when I click to test here, Zapier gave me this URL, which I'm going to copy.

And I'm going to paste that in Tangram. And then I'll hit save on our webhook here.  The thing that just happened is Zapier is giving me this URL where they're listening for data from the Tangerine map.  In this particular case I'm going to actually send a test payload. And if I test trigger here, the actually there's no transactions on this platform.

That one in particular didn't work. I'm going to actually make a new webhook.  I'll use the same URL from Zapier, but I'll just make one for listing creation because there are actually listings.  We'll do listing created, and then we'll use the same hook URL,

hit save. And now when a listing is created that data will get sent to Zapier.  I'm gonna run a test on that. And if I refresh that now, we should see, yeah.  We see now in the second request here This is the payload from Tangram. And what this is showing is the last listing created on that Tangram map, which is just test data.

We'll continue with that and we can do whatever we want with it now.  We can, a common thing that I've seen people do is connect this to MailChimp. And then you can like add or update a subscriber or create a campaign or add. Send a campaign or you can add a user to a campaign, stuff like that.

Or you can, you know, do. Some other mail platform like another one I worked with recently was Brevo. I'm just, sorry, let me delete this MailChimp one. I'd delete that

and we'll add, if you search Brevo, maybe if you search mail, there's other options yet.  Like MailerLite here, Zoho Mail, Mailgun, you can use any of these platforms. and integrate them with Zapier, or you can, in some cases, integrate directly with the platform itself. But Zapier is a really easy way to do it.

Another platform I can recommend is make. com, which is pretty much the same thing as Zapier. I personally don't use it very much, but I've heard good things and they have a very generous free tier.  That might be worth checking out if you're looking to achieve this. But hopefully that's helpful.

Let me know if you have any questions about any of this, but otherwise have a great rest of your day."

‍