After completing class project 4. I had moved on to what would technically be my 3rd project with Tines: Programmatically personalizing emails based off templates. At the core, this Tines story takes a pre-defined email template and will go through and personalize it per intended recipient (including names, dates, specifics, attachments, CC addresses, BCC addresses, etc.). The final part of the story creates this draft email with all personalized content into the operator’s Microsoft outlook email box, ready to manually check accuracy.
In its current iteration, it is not fully automated, as a specific trigger event needs to be created and triggered manually. Depending on attachments, not all are automated in adding yet, either. The last step also only creates the draft, it does not send. This is a personal setting, as I wanted to verify everything was being setup properly before sending.
Although it doesn’t seem like this project is very useful, for my purposes, I write up to around 50 emails on a rotating 3-4 week basis for work, with very similar base content and updated content included. Even with a base template already created, I was calculating an average of 4-6 minutes per email copying/pasting the template and replacing/adding the personalization and any changed/updated content. Across the 50 estimated emails this was taking up an average of 250 minutes (4+ hours) every 3-4 weeks. Also not factoring in anything else that would come up during this process that would need to be handled in the moment and sidetrack sending the emails (very frequent). In the current state of the Tines story (as discussed here), setting up and running the story start to finish (even including manual verification of the drafted email content for accuracy), 50 emails would be cut down to 20-30 minutes in duration. Further automation of this process is very do-able and could cut this process down to 10 minutes or even shorter by my estimation.
This project became very complex, especially for me, with barely intermediate knowledge of Tines and processes involved with making this work. Some of the technical skills and knowledge involved to get this to work:
This is one of my favorite Tines projects so far due to the complexity, the experience(s) of learning, troubleshooting and setting it up, end result, and how useful it became. At some point, may simplify the logic, and/or fully automate the process. Due to it being such a niche use, not much time has been spent beyond just getting it to work.