I don’t know what made me happier yesterday: the fact that the Wired iPad app is now free for subscribers of the print magazine (especially with a postal strike looming) or the way in which they told me: “hey, click here to get the app, and pop your account number in, which by the way is this.”
In the past, I’d get mails like this at the office (just like this time,) but I’ve got at least three different mailing addresses and oddly don’t remember my subscriber numbers, so I’d have to save the mail to remind myself to set the thing up when I’m home, assuming I can find a magazine with a mailing label. As it happened, my copy of Wired comes bagged, and one had just arrived, so the mailing label was gone, which means I’d have to remember to set up this free thing for a whole month (or more, see aforementioned postal strike comment.)
And, credit where credit is due but really shouldn’t have to be said… but has to be said, let’s not forget that there’s a link to the app in the email as well, instead of a “search for us in the app store,” which, a ridiculous amount of time hasn’t worked anyway since I use the Canadian store.
“Free” doesn’t always mean easy, but this execution was almost perfect. Kudos to Wired for getting that together, and thanks for the app – between this and the Bloomberg Business Week one, I’m really loving the iPad right now.
Anwyay, let’s take a step back and look at execution. It turns out that this kind of email integration with your CRM is actually relatively easy to do, from a no-to-low coding perspective, by subscribing to a 3rd party email newsletter/autoresponder service. Even with lower-end email systems; most offer the ability to add custom fields to each record and to display the data in the messages that go out. The trick, especially with the more affordable services, is to manage to add addresses without requiring a confirmation email. This is important, because you have a business relationship with them, but some won’t confirm if they receive a mail asking them to click a link. (By the way, the Wired mail had a “manage your preferences” link.)
The “bolt-on” approach to email integration can be a little tricky as well if you’re looking to fully automate your process, and even if you get the glue to stick, it’s important to remember that users can opt out of this kind of marketing at any time, so this kind of plan needs to be designed to be loosely coupled if you’re bolting on another service.
The alternative to email integration would be no integration at all. You could simply create your own email delivery system and add it to your application, which obviously takes work, and adds a whole level of long-term maintenance complexity that’s often overlooked: it’s generally a bad idea to send messages directly from your server. Your host may have rate limits, your IP address might be blacklisted already from a previous user, and you might send too many mails to a certain gateway over a set period of time, triggering alerts and potential blacklisting again, just to name a few issues.
The third option for email integration, which is what I’m now recommending to clients unless they’ve got a specific goal that aligns with an existing email marketing system, is to do the custom code inside the application, but leverage the growing number of delivery services out there including PostageApp, SendGrid, PostmarkApp, CritSend, and Deliver, in addition to Amazon’s recent offering. (Note I got that list from a Quora post by Jon Lim, who works for PostageApp, and that’s pretty cool that he listed his competitors like that.) This allows you to outsource what I believe is just the right level of expertise, without exposing too much of your customer data to an outside service that might get hit with a data breach like the Epsilon one in April.
And please note, I’m not in any way endorsing spam-like tactics here, just scenarios like the one I opened with, where for example Wired had some important information that provided me with great value, and it was important for both of us that I received that message. Your email integration needs will vary, and could just include notifications from a service, or transaction results post-purchase, for example, which aren’t directly tied to marketing, except for the parts that are 
