Grow Your List

What is Grow Your List?

Grow Your List is an open-source mailing list on AWS in alpha stage. It comes with:

• An API: integrate the mailing list into your software/website.
• Broadcast emails: send emails to all subscribers or subscribers that match criteria.
• Autoresponders: automatically decide actions to take based on subscribers' interactions with emails.
• Analytics: see the click and open rates for your emails.

Import to note: at this stage, you need need to build your own user interface for things like sign-up forms and email templates. Grow Your List just provides a cost-effective way to run the 'behind-the-scenes' part of a mailing list using AWS.

Setup

Automated deployment on AWS

To get started with Grow Your List, ensure you have Node.JS installed (the deployment process is tested with version Node.JS 12), have an AWS access key for an admin account at the ready then run the command:

npx growyourlist setup

This will take you through the GYL setup. Have ready:

• An access id and a secret access key for a user with admin permissions (see AWS Docs)
• An email address you would like to use as the default 'from' address in emails sent by the Grow Your List mailing list (you must have access to its inbox to verify it)
• An email address you would like to use to receive admin emails (also requires verification)

Once that is complete, take note of the output! It has:

• a .pem key and a hostname which can be used to connect to an EC2 instance processing your mailing list queue.
• an api url and api auth key. Keep these safe, they can be used to control your GYL mailing list system.

🟦 Note: when using SES for the first time, it is in sandbox mode. This means that emails sent to emails that have not been validated in advance will fail. This makes it relatively safe to test out GYL for the first time. Test emails can be validated here.

When you are ready to move into production mode, follow these steps to move out of sandbox mode.

Creating your first emails

1. Open up admin.growyourlist.com and log in using the api url and api key obtained upon AWS deployment completion.
2. Click 'Emails' and start creating emails to send to your subscribers.
3. Once you have emails, you can set up autoresponders as well or move on to the next section to start subscribing people to your list.

Integrating Grow Your List with your software/website

To subscribe a subscriber:

// This is the key and url obtained after running the setup process.
$Gyl = new GylApi($apiKey, $apiUrl);

try {
	$Gyl->postSubscriber([

		// The email of the subscriber
		'email' => '[email protected]',

		// Any tags that apply to the subscriber. Use a list-* tag as standard
		// practice to assign the subscriber to a list.
		'tags' => 'list-default',

		// Assign custom properties relevant to your software.
		'customProp' => 'custom prop value'
	]);
}
catch (Exception $ex) {
	// Handle exceptions here. If there is bad data (e.g. invalid email), that
	// will fail here as well as errors when talking to the API.
}

To subscribe a subscriber and simultaneously trigger an autoresponder:

$Gyl = new GylApi($apiKey, $apiUrl);

try {
	$Gyl->postSubscriber(
		[
			'email' => '[email protected]',
			'tags' => 'list-default'
		],
		// Add trigger in options parameter
		[
			'trigger' => [

				// Set the type of the trigger to autoresponder
				'type' => 'autoresponder',

				// Specify the id of the autoresponder to be run
				'triggerId' => 'TestAutoresponder'
			]
		]
	);
}
catch (Exception $ex) {
	// ...
}

To update a subscriber:

	// If a subscriber already exists, and the same email is posted, the values
	// will be merged together. For example, if the subscriber:
	// {email:'[email protected]', customProp1:'value 1'}
	// is already in the GYL database and the following is run:
	$Gyl->postSubscriber(
		[
			'email' => '[email protected]',
			'customProp2' => 'value 2'
		]
	);
	// The subscriber in the database will be updated to:
	// {email:'[email protected]', customProp1:'value 1', customProp2: 'value 2'}

🟦 Note: if an existing subscriber is posted with the autoresponder trigger but already has all of the tags specified in the tags property, then the autoresponder will not be run. This can be used to prevents autoresponders running multiple times for the same subscriber; by using a welcome-autoresponder tag, for example.

Removing Grow Your List from your AWS account

To remove Grow Your List from your AWS account run the command:

npx growyourlist destruct

WARNING: This will remove all the Grow Your List data and functionality. There is no going back once you run this command.