Growing Digital Storefronts with Mailgun and Drupal

Founded in 2001, Drupal is a popular open source CMS that remains competitive in the open source ecosystem due to wide support from thousands of contributors all over the world. Drupal is known to be powerful in the hands of an experienced developer, and thanks to a very structured architecture and documented coding standards, integrating any 3rd party services (including mail delivery) into Drupal-based websites is relatively straightforward. DevBranch, a Ukranian-based team of senior Drupal developers, is an example of what makes the Drupal CMS so powerful. As maintainers of the Mailgun integration for Drupal, DevBranch uses our email sending service to build top performing websites for their clients and partners. 

DevBranch is not a traditional digital agency. As they are specifically known for their Drupal expertise, agencies hire them to serve as Drupal developers on complex, technical projects. As you might expect, a transactional email service is a common need for DevBranch projects. Since 2016, DevBranch has relied on Mailgun to handle the email delivery aspect for the majority of their projects. We chatted with Bohdan Artemchuk, co-founder and Drupal Architect at DevBranch, about how they came to discover Mailgun, and the results his team has achieved with our platform.

When asked how DevBranch became aware of Mailgun, Bohdan explains that, “sometime in 2016 one of our clients had a problem with their sending reputation. We started looking for another ESP for them, and decided to give Mailgun a try. Our testing showed that Mailgun was flexible and powerful, so we started to use them on the project. The killer feature for the first project was tags and tags-based analytics, which helped our client to identify which emails had the highest engagement rate. This resulted in them having better open rates!”

Sending Emails with Mailgun and Drupal case study results

One of the next email streams they brought to Mailgun was for a business sending about 2 million emails a month, mostly made up of email newsletters and email marketing campaigns. The client was satisfied with the profit seen from these campaigns, so no one at the company was investigating the deliverability analytics. However, the Mailgun analytics dashboard revealed an opportunity for the DevBranch team to go above and beyond for this client.

After migrating the sending stream to Mailgun and using the tag-based analytical tools, the team at DevBranch discovered that a vast amount of those emails were either not delivered or opened. ISPs look for good email engagement when deciding whether emails belong in the inbox or in the spam folder, so while the client wasn’t concerned about the success of their email campaigns, they were likely not performing at their full potential. Sure enough, when the DevBranch team removed the inactive subscribers, the campaign’s overall clickthrough rate increased, even though the client was sending less frequently (about half as many as before). Because DevBranch was able to lower the number of emails sent, while increasing the efficiency of their customers email program, they greatly increased the return on investment of their customer’s email program.

True to the open-source spirit, the DevBranch team wanted to share the positive experiences they have had at Mailgun with the larger Drupal community. At the time, the Mailgun to Drupal integration was new and not very mature. The DevBranch team of Drupal developers therefore knew they could give back by maintaining and improving the integration as a team.

Bohdan explains, “We have consistently been improving the module, and recommending Mailgun to our partners, thus integrating it on dozens of projects. Every time we need to use Mailgun for our next project, regardless of if we are starting from scratch or working on an existing build, installing and configuring Mailgun is quite an easy task. We appreciate the reliability we experience at Mailgun. We've been working with you since 2016 and there have been no major issues. It has been a great experience so far. We are so pleased with our relationship with Mailgun that we even composed a whole Case Study (which we don’t do often) for the community to learn more about Mailgun + Drupal opportunities.” 

One of our primary goals with the Mailgun API is to make it a joy for developers to work with. To that end, we are thankful for the members of the Drupal community like DevBranch who have invested considerable time and care into maintaining the Drupal integration for Mailgun. If you’re interested in using the Mailgun integration for Drupal on your next project, you can find it here.

Download the full case study