Send transactional email from OneSignal using SendGrid, Mailgun, and Mandrill to distribute a newsletter, marketing campaign, product updates, offers, etc.
Compared to transactional emails, the marketing email platform is more costly. Usually, the price is doubled or higher.
But what if I told you that sending attractive emails comes at the expense of sending transactional emails?
That’s accurate. It is doable.
Although I recognize that competent email marketing systems have a wide range of functionality, do you utilize them?
OneSignal might be worthwhile to test if you blog or often update your products without employing those sophisticated marketing capabilities.
How does it operate and what is OneSignal?
OneSignal provides a well-liked push notification service. Uber, Wix, Kinsta, Cisco, Adobe, and more are just a few of the more than 200,000 apps that use it.
They have introduced a tool for email marketing.
A solution that allows you to link email service providers so that marketing emails may be sent at the cost of transactional email service.
Let’s use a SendGrid example as our guide.
SendGrid provides 12,000 emails every month for FREE, and if you have a large list, it will cost you $9.95 for 100,000 emails.
You now have to pay $$$ each month if you need to send emails using a different platform like MailChimp.

The platform for OneSignal is totally free to use. You must, however, pay the relevant email service providers. The following are supported at the moment.
- SendGrid
- Mailgun
- Mandrill
So, if you want to utilize SendGrid and have a modest email list, you may send up to 12,000 emails for free.
Let’s examine a few of OneSignal’s email features.
- To target the appropriate users with your email, employ segmentation, a strong segmentation technique.
- Send it later via scheduling.
- Rich-text editors let you easily alter the material in a way that suits you.
- Send comparable email formats by using a template. Save as a template so you may use it again.
Additionally, email displays flawlessly on all gadgets, including smartphones.
So how do you begin?
If you are an established user and have an app set up, you may start by going to « Messages » >> New email.
The following advice will be helpful for you, nonetheless, if you are completely new to OneSignal.
Making the OneSignal App
Making an app is one of the first things you must accomplish. You ought to see something similar to the following after logging in.
- Simply click the « Plus icon. »
- Create by entering the app’s name.
- It will then ask you to select the platform. You can close it as we will just be using email functionality at this time.
- You will be asked to confirm exiting the platform setup once again. Choose « Exit Setup »
- Next, we’ll setup the Email on the settings page.
- Click Save after choosing the provider, API key, etc.
- Emails may be sent using OneSignal and SendGrid after a successful connection.
Let’s attempt to send one.
But hold on.
Where are you sending it to? The user’s email must be added first.
- Open the USERS menu. Users All >> Import/Export
- Pick Manually add users from the pop-up wizard.
- Submit the email after entering it.
Please just submit one email for testing. Once everything has been verified as OK, upload them in bulk using CSV or programmatically (more on this later in this article).
The following screen will appear; click establish platform(s).
We may try sending one email at this time.
- Select « New Email » from the MESSAGES menu. There are four parts.
- Since we just have one email address, let the audience default to ALL.
- Enter a subject in the email details box.
- Create a message and include your preferred material
- You have the option to email it now or at a later time.
- Confirm Message by clicking.
- You will see a popup with the confirmation information, and you may click it. Message Sender
That’s it.
You now understand how to build a OneSignal app to begin emailing.
Previous emails’ import to OneSignal
You might want to import an email list that you already have into OneSignal.
There’s good news: it’s doable!
- Access the Users tab.
- Select Import/Export under All Users.
There are two ways to obtain email imports, as you can see.
The majority of email marketing solutions let you export the emails to a CSV file for import. Other import techniques are also available, as detailed in their official literature here.
So far, so good?
Delivery Analytics for Email
You must be wondering if OneSignal received a report on email delivery.
In fact, it does. There are the following accessible.
- Total clickthrough rate
- Delivery information
- Statistics on conversions show how many people unsubscribed or reported scams.
The report may be filtered by the previous 2/30 minutes, 24 hours, and 5 days.
Limitation
Email functions currently have certain restrictions because they are a newer feature. I’ve observed a few of these, including:
- There is no widget to directly gather emails from your site.
- The email list cannot be synchronized with WordPress or another platform.
I hope OneSignal works on adding these capabilities so they can offer a complete email marketing solution at a reasonable price.
OneSignal appears promising all around. Try it out for free to see how it works.
Sendy, a self-hosted email program that you may install on your server to send email using AWS SES, is another alternate choice.