We want ClassDojo to be a delightful product for teachers and parents everywhere, and we've found that email is an effective channel to showcase awesome features and to offer help if our users need it. These emails are known as lifecycle emails, and the central idea is to send the right content to the right user at the right time.

Up until last year, we had been using third party services for lifecycle communication, but we grew increasingly frustrated with the limitations they presented, and decided to build our own system. So far, we are really happy with its capabilities, performance, and reliability!

This will be a three part blog series covering how we do lifecycle emails at ClassDojo. We'll start with an overview of the system and its architecture, move on to our experience using Redshift for this system in Part II, and finally explain some unique advantages our system offers compared off-the-shelf third party solution in Part III.