Manage an email-based day-by-day training course

January 28, 2013 9:36 AM

I work on technology with a staff of about 30 teachers. I found a way to introduce new technologies that seems to work well: Each day I send out an email with a five-minute task. After about 40 of those, provided you stick with them, you're pretty strong. Now I'd like to automate this per user. How?

An example: The teachers have new interactive projectors. So I've been sending out "Day 1 with Your Projector," and so on. Each task is tiny and discrete, so the teachers don't seem to mind the dailiness of the emails.

Now I'd like to be able to do this:

-- I store a sequence of, say, 40 of these emails.
-- A user signs up to start a course at some arbitrary date. Maybe even starting today.
-- That user receives, beginning at the start date, daily emails (M-F) in sequence.

This means that I might have 25 users signed on. On day X, one user is receiving day 15, another is receiving day 3. Another might be on vacation but due to receive day 23 when she returns. And so on.

I'll need to automate this or I'll go insane.

We're a Google Apps shop, and I have some Python skills (and access to servers). Commercial services are not out of the question, but open source tools are ideal.

It be hugely helpful if you know of a service that can do precisely this job. General recommendations of "X is an awesome mail manager, look into it" are not so great. For example, I know lots of people use MailChimp, but I don't think it can send out emails on staggered schedules matched to users. Unless I'm wrong...

Thanks in advance.

posted by argybarg to Computers & Internet (1 answer total)

Pretty sure that AWeber can do exactly this - it's called an "autoresponder" or a "followup broadcast" and you can set the schedule, like message 2 goes out X days after message 1, and message 3 goes out Y days after that, etc. It's definitely a paid service, though.
posted by danceswithlight at 9:59 AM on January 28, 2013