How do I set up an email that segments according to subscriber choices?

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I currently use Mailchimp for one reason only -- it allows me to send an email which segments according to the selections each subscriber makes.

Here is an example:

I run a book promotions website.
Every day we send out an email newsletter which contains the latest deals on bestselling books.
Each person who subscribes to the email can choose from 34 categories of fiction genre -- which type of books they are interested in. EG: Romance, Mystery, Scifi, and 31 others...

We create ONE email, with ALL books in it. And we send it out to our subscriber list. But each subscriber only receives the email with the books in the categories they have selected -- EG: Someone who says they are only interested in Romance and mystery books will only see books in those categories.

It is a very useful feature of Mailchimp that allows us to do this -- otherwise we would either have to send multiple emails according to the categories (genres) people had chosen. Or we would have to send EvERYONE the full list of books, even though they aren't interested in many of the categories.

So -- the problem is that Mailchimp is expensive. And not that great really, apart from this feature.

So -- I am looking for an alternative.

Either another email service that does this OR (preferably) some way of doing it myself.

Does anyone know how I can set this up independently of Mailchimp?

What I have tried:

Does anyone know how I can set this up independently of Mailchimp?

Posted 23-Apr-19 10:24am

Quornroast

Updated 23-Apr-19 11:00am

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Gerry Schmitz · Answer 1 · 2019-04-23T11:00:00

Solution 1

You create one "template" per campaign; tagging each section / division with a category / class.

You spin emails by running over the template for each client; suppressing anything that doesn't match the current receipient's preferences.

Posted 23-Apr-19 11:00am

Gerry Schmitz

Slacker007 · Answer 2 · 2019-04-23T11:00:00

I would check this out: Transactional Email API Service For Developers | Mailgun[^]

Not free for production, but I think the development license is.

I have never done the sectional stuff that you are referring to, before, but I have used Mailgun before and it is quite nice and powerful.

I would think that you would want to set up a master html email template and have divs/sections that would populate with data from a db. the div/sections would be relational to your subscription choices. Hide the sections that have no data, and show the ones that do. -- this is one potential way of doing this.