Raphaël: Hey, and welcome back to our series on EC's methodology. Last time we talked about automation and your deployment processes. Today, we'll talk about communicating with your users. Sometimes it's about confirming an email address, other times it's about a notification and yet other times it's about sending users onboarding messages. Unfortunately, sometimes it's also about asking users who've dropped off. Why they aren't using your product anymore.
Communication takes many forms, but with digital products, the most common one is email. So one of the first things you'll probably need to do, if you're going to communicate through email is set up, what's called an SMTP provider like SendGrid. SMTP stands for simple mail transfer protocol. Remember how we talked about domains previously.
Your users are going to expect to see your domain in the, from email address when they receive a password reset or email confirmation, or even just a notification email. SMTP providers like SendGrid, MailJet, and others will allow you to connect your domain to their service so that when your users receive an email from your platform, their mail client, like Gmail can authenticate that it's actually coming from you. You can use tools like SendGrid right out of the box with your code.
But for a lot of stuff, we find it's more powerful and convenient to use event driven tools that tie into your analytics. We recommend using tools like segment.com to unify your customer data across the different parts of your application. And using it to leverage tools like Intercom or customer.io to reach your users at the right point in their journey. Using tools like that will also let you communicate through other channels, like SMS or in-app and more.
If you'd like to learn more about how to build an app, we've put together a free PDF that outlines our process. We're also curious to learn more about how you communicate with your customers. Let us know in the comments. And follow us. If you want to keep up with this series, we've got a lot more to share. We're constantly updating our process. As we learn more from ourselves, our partners and our community.
If you think we could work together, we'd love to hear from you and see if we can help you out with your next project. Thanks and see you next time.