shotstack / christmas-2019-personalised-email

A sample script we used to prepare and send 300 personalised videos to our Mailchimp subscribers

Personalised Christmas Video Example

This example loops through a list of contacts and creates a personalised video using the Shotstack API. It creates a mailing list with the video filename ready for mail merging in an application like Mailchimp.

Requirements

• NodeJS >= 8
• A shotstack API key and Customer ID

You can sign up for an API key via our website.

This guide assumes a Linux base operating system is being used.

Installation

Install dependencies:

npm install

Setup

Rename the .env.dist file and populate with your API key and customer ID.

mv .env.dist .env

Rename user-list.dist.csv or create a user-list.csv with a list of users to create personalised videos for including their email address and first name.

mv user-list.dist.csv user-list.csv

Usage

Once your list is prepared run the queue.js script to personalise the template and POST the edit to the Shotstack API:

npm run queue

The script will limit the number of videos that can be queued at one time to a maximum of 20, to work through a mailing list you should set a --skip argument to skip through records in the CSV file and you can override the default number of records to queue using the --limit argument.

To skip the first 20 records and queue the next 20:

npm run queue -- --skip 20

To skip the first 40 records and queue the next 10:

npm run queue -- --skip 40 --limit 10

As videos are queued the users name, email, video file name and a preview URL will be written to mailing-list.csv which can be used in a mail merge email service like Mailchimp.

You can also view the videos once they are rendered using the preview URL written to the file.

Notes:

• This is an example only, using this on large lists will quickly be throttled and rate limited. You should build your own batching and throttling if you wish to use this at scale.
• It can take a few minutes for videos to render and be available for previewing.
• Videos should be transfered to your own video hosting provider or S3 bucket before sedning to customers. The preivew URL will expire after 24 hours and the video will be deleted.