Does your Bubble app send emails? Chances are you might already have added in a workflow just like this, where you use the Send Email workflow action in Bubble.

Alternative to SendGrid Bubble email

Even if your Bubble app has got nothing to do with emails, you'll find that you'll need to send emails in cases such as password reset or email verification. So emails are an essential part of your Bubble app. And to be honest, if you go into settings and you set up your domain, you've the API details for SendGrid, you might find the SendGrid API is quite lacking. And that's because the built-in integration with SendGrid that Bubble provides is a bit out of date. It uses their legacy templates, for example.

Benefits of using Loops to send Bubble emails

You can do so much better. And that's why I'm excited today to highlight to you a new contender on the block called Loops. And Loops is perfect, I think, for many Bubble app creators because it is the email for modern SaaS. And they are an all-in-one solution with a beautiful interface that combines marketing and transactional email.What does that mean?

What are marketing emails?

Well, marketing emails, they're your email campaigns. They're the special sale that you've got going on or the new feature that you've released that you want to send to all or a large segment of your users.

What are transactional emails?

Transactional emails, well, a transactional email tends to be the result of an action that the user has taken. So a transactional email is a password reset email because they followed the password reset workflow in your app, or a welcome email, or if you are sending notifications via email, then that would go on the transactional. And I'm going to show you in this video how it's really easy to integrate in with the Loops API. You can start adding contacts, you can start putting automations.

Beautiful emails sent from your Bubble app

But before I do that, I want to highlight some things I love about them. First of all, they've really understood where email is at right now. You can do a quick search and you can find that there is loads of research showing that basically the more beautified in an old-fashioned sense, the more graphic intensive background, colors, sections, stripes, that thing, your emails have got. Basically, the more HTML design that goes into it is actually being shown to have a lower engagement rate than something that comes across as being a bit more personal, a bit more like it's actually been written in someone's email composer window rather than using a service, for example, like Mailchimp, where it's very HTML template heavy.

So they've got a great API. You can set up automations. They've got tagging, there you go. You can track your users through the different steps that they take. Yeah, currently there's a waitlist. Now, I only signed up a couple of days ago, and I was granted access to it about 24 hours. I think that this is a really exciting service.

Find more Bubble tutorials

So let me show you how to add it to the Bubble API, Bubble API connector. But before I do that, did you know that Planet No Code? We've been building this educational resource all around Bubble, and we've been doing that for over a year now. We've got hundreds of Bubble tutorial videos. We've got Bubble coaching. You can find all of that on our website, panetnocode.com.

Bubble API Connector

So I'm going to show how to integrate in with the API. And let me get the documentation back up. Where's that gone? Live Docs. So the API is going to form quite a small but lovely and simple part of your Bubble app, which is adding users. And that's because you do all of the automation, the steps. You could have an onboarding flow, welcome email, follow up email, that thing.

You do all of that in Loops itself. So we're going to focus on just add contact. So I'm going to take the endpoint here and go into my Bubble app and the API connector. I don't know what, add another API called this Loops. So. I think they authenticated in the header. I'm going to check that in the moment. But I'll just say here add contact. Paste in the endpoint. It's a POST command, and I'm going to copy the formatting of the JSON here. Change this to POST, change that action, paste the JSON in. I'm only going to use these two fields for this demo, clean up my JSON. Email, first name, pick a both of those public. And then I need the API key. So I'm going to scroll back up and look at Authentication. So it says, Generate an API key, and it adds to the header.

So I could say, Shared header, Accept, application/JSON. And then the key name is Authorization. I just spotted that if I scroll across here, and then I have to add in Bearer and my API key. Let's copy this. Okay, let's test that out. I'll put in my email address.

I'll click on the email address and let's initialize. Okay, and there you go. It's just worked. Now, this is the very first time I've done this. I literally just signed up for loops myself. So let's just see how that's worked in my dashboard. If I go through to audience, I can see the account that I just added is there.

Why you'll love using Loops and Bubble.io

And so, yeah, just as a reminder, you can search your own templates, you can add campaigns, loops, transactional email. This really does cover everything you need right the way through from MVP to... I mean, if we go back onto the homepage, there are some businesses here that are either rapidly gaining traction or already are huge in their own sense. And yeah, I think Loops is very affordable, and it is a great new contender in both the email marketing and the transactional email space if you're building an MVP and adding email automation to your Bubble app.