2-way Email Syncing Using Sendgrid

We released a new feature that allows you to sync your email both ways and even reply to incoming emails using our native Sendgrid integration.

This allows you to have a full-sized email marketing solution directly inside any of your chatbots.

First of all, we will need to integrate with Sendgrid.

Connecting to Sendgrid

In order to connect to Sendgrid go to the integration section from your UChat dashboard and then go to the section Email Marketing and choose Sendgrid

Here we will need for 4 pieces of information:

• API Key

• Sender Name

• Sender Email

• Receiving Domain

Let’s head into Sendgrid and see which steps we need to make:

Fetching the API Key

We will first grab the API key by going to Settings -› then select API Keys. Once here press the button “Create API Key”.

From the next screen that will be loaded you will need to give your API key a name, give it full access and finally press the button “Create & View”

Do take note to copy and paste the API key somewhere safe because it will be the only time you will see it.

Once you are done let’s head over to the next section which will be to Authenticate a domain

Sender Authentication

From the left-hand menu where you found the section for API keys go down a bit until you see Sender Authentication and press it

From here you will get an overview of your domains but if this is your first time that overview will be blank

Domain Authentication

Press the first button named “Authenticate Your Domain”

You will come to the above overview where you will have two options to go over.

1. Select your DNS provider. If you press the dropdown you will see an entire list of different providers. If yours is not among them you can choose the very last option “other host (not listed)”

2. Branded links. If you would like to have branded links appear in your emails then you will need to enable this option. Once doing so it will add an extra CNAME record in the next overview

Once done both options press the button “Next”

You will then need to type in your preferred domain you want to use. Once doing so you will see an example on the right side appearing

When done you can go to the advanced settings below your typed domain and select any of the options. The standard automated security will be enough.

Press the button “Next” to continue

You will now get an overview of the CNAME records you need to add to your DNS.

Once you have added it and some time has passed checkmark the box named “I’ve added these records” and then press the button “Verify”. Both can be found at the bottom right corner of this dns overview page

Once the verification has passed you will get a confirmation screen

Single Sender verification

Now that the domain is registered you will need to go ahead and verify an email that can be used

Press the “Single Sender Verification” button.

A new screen will appear where you will need to fill in all your details. Once done press the button named “Create”

Once done you will see an overview of your verified email

Connecting to UChat

Now that we have all the pieces of information it is time to fill them into the UChat integration.

Just go to the mentioned section in your workspace and fill in the data

Now for the receiving domain you can directly grab one of the domains you just verified under the sender authentication tab. Then press the button save.

This will generate webhook url you can use inside the next step.

Just copy the webhook url and then go back to Sendgrid -› Settings -> Inbound Parse -> Add Host & URL -> Receiving Domain. From here press the button “Add host & URL”

You will get the following overview:

For the subdomain you can actually grab the beginning of the verified domain which will be a series of letters and numbers. Just go back to your sender authentication section and copy and past that value insight.

Then for the domain itself you can pick your verified domain from the dropdown. Lastly you will paste the webhook url you received inside of UChat in the Destination URL section.

Additional options are recommended to enable as well. Once done press the button “add”

Once done you will get an overview of your verified domains.

The only thing left now is to go back to UChat and press Save one more time for all changes to take effect.

You are now good to go and use 2-way email syncing in UChat!

How to use 2-way email syncing

Let’s head into a chatbot and go to a live chat conversation with a bot user who already opted in for email and create an email to send.

As you can see the email has just been sent to the user. Any emails send or received will appear with a pink color to clearly show what type of message this is.

Let’s check if we received the email in our inbox and then reply to it.

As you can see we have received the email in our inbox. So the next step is to check if we can receive replies back into our live chat inbox in UChat.

Perfect!

Here you see it is reply because of the title marked as Re:

We can now easily reply to this by hovering over the top right corner of the email which will show a dropdown arrow. When you press it you will see you can now press the option “reply”.

You can either send an email by pressing “Email” between Reply and Note at the bottom or by going to the email icon on the right hand side.

When your email has been sent it is time to take a look at the user inbox to see if we replied and started a thread.

And finally, as you can see inside the user inbox it will display inside the current thread with this user.

So this is the way how you can set up a 2-way email syncing system inside of UChat using our native integration with Sendgrid!

The video walkthrough can be viewed here: