Plunk is the open-source email platform for AWS. It brings together all aspects of email into one place, so you can focus on building your product.

Whenever you track an event or send an email to a user, Plunk will automatically create a contact. This contact contains all the information you need, including the user’s email address and any metadata you have added. A contact in Plunk is shared across all types of emails, so you can use the same contact for transactional emails, campaigns, and automations. This gives you a single pane of glass to view all of your user’s email activity.

Actions

Actions, often called automations, are repeatable email sequences that are triggered by a user event. For example, a welcome email when a user signs up, or a reminder email when a user abandons their cart.

Actions offer you a few configuration options that allow you to customize them to your needs. This includes:

  • Being able to delay the email, for example, send the welcome email 1 hour after the user signs up.
  • Being able to exclude users from receiving the email, for example, exclude users who already have a subscription.

Setting up an action is easy. You can find how to do so in the guide.

Transactional Emails

Sometimes you don’t want to set up an entire automation, but instead, want to quickly send an email to a user. This is where transactional emails come in. They allow you to email your users with a single API call.

Campaigns

Once you have collected some contacts, you can start sending them campaigns. A campaign is a one-off email that you send to a group of contacts. For example, newsletters, product updates, or announcements. Using the metadata you have added to your contacts, you can segment your contacts into lists, making it easy to send a campaign to a specific group of users.