Sending a custom welcome email to your Community Members

This tutorial will help you use Ensemble Chat’s webbooks functionality with Mailerlite, in order to send a custom welcome email to newly joined members

Before getting started, you’ll need to have a MailerLite account. If are unfamiliar with MailerLite, we’d suggest creating an account first and getting to know a few things about their service. While there are many email marketing platforms (such as Mailchimp, Moosend) we are using MailerLite for this tutorial.

Setting Up a Subscribers Group in Mailerlite

1. Create a new Group under subscribers. If you want to add users to an existing group, you may omit this step.
2. Once your Group is ready, go to Automations and create a new Workflow.
3. Give your wokflow a name (i.e Welcome Email)
4. Select When Subscriber joins a group as the Workflow Trigger
5. Select your previously created group
6. Click Save

7. Select Email (you can customize your workflow according to your needs, for example define actions or conditions before sending an email)
Fill in the Subject, and Who’s it from information before selecting the Email content

8. Create a new email design or select one of your existing email designs.
Once you complete the email design and return to your workflow, make sure to turn on the workflow using the switch button.

9. Go to MailerLite integrations and select API.

10. From this page, copy your API key and the GroupID corresponding to your workflow group.

Connect MailerLite with your Community on Ensemble

1. Go to your Ensemble community Dashboard, under Webhooks and Create a Webhook with Event Type: User Joined Team.

2. In the Url field type the MailerLite endpoint for adding a user into a group:

https://api.mailerlite.com/api/v2/groups/YOURGROUPID/subscribers/import

! Make sure to replace YOURGROUPID with the GroupID you copied earlier.

3. Add the following in the Custom Headers section:

Content-Type: application/json
X-MailerLite-ApiKey: YOURAPIKEY

! Making sure to replace YOURAPIKEY with the MailerLite API Key you copied earlier.

4. Add the following in the Custom Payload section:

{
 "subscribers": [{
  "email": "%email%",
  "fields": {
   "name": "%username%",
   "country": "%country%"
  }
 }]
}

This will create a new subscriber to your MailerLite group, and store additional user information such as their username and country.

A few notes: 
You can create another workflow automation for when a member leaves your Ensemble Community. This is great when you want minimize churn and enhance membership reactivation.
MailerLite will handle sending out emails to your added subscribers. If you face any mail delivery issues I’d suggest contacting MailerLite support directly. They’re responding pretty fast and are very helpful.