In the Courier app, navigate to Channels and choose your email service provider. For this tutorial, we will use Gmail.

This tutorial covers two different ways for PHP developers to send scheduled and recurring email notifications through the Courier notification platform using its PHP SDK. It also offers a low-code solution for sending scheduled emails using just the Courier UI. Courier is a multi-channel notification service with a robust API, which you can use to build a production-ready email notification system in a few minutes.

Create a Courier account if you don’t already have one, so that you can configure an email service provider in Courier, allowing it to send emails on your behalf. \

Now you have three options:Directly send scheduled or recurring emails using Courier: Call the sendEnhancedNotification() function from the Courier PHP SDK, and use a third party task scheduling library called Crunz to deal with the scheduling side of things. This works using cron syntax, so the same principle can be used for scheduled or recurring emails.Use Courier’s automations to add send logic to your scheduled emails: An automation in Courier is a way of chaining together different steps such as the sending of emails (or other notification-related logic) so that the steps happen in a particular order. An automation can be run by calling the invokeAutomation()function, and as with option 1, you can use Crunz to deal with the scheduling.Using Courier’s no-code automations designer: This is a no-code GUI tool in the Courier UI that uses a drag-and-drop canvas to build up your notification logic. It contains some more advanced logic than option 2 (such as the ability to create email digests or batching).

On the next screen, select Sign in with Google to give Courier permission to access your Gmail account.

Sending timely targeted email notifications greatly affects how your audience engages with your product. For these notifications to be effective at notifying your users of key events, you need to schedule when they are sent so that they are delivered at the right time.

Scheduled and recurring notifications are in use everywhere — for example, online stores use scheduled notifications to inform users about sale events (like Black Friday), and doctors, dentists, and tradespeople have systems that send appointment reminders. Recurring emails are commonly used for subscription services to email monthly bills to customers.