C-Sunshine’s outreach system supporting expansion

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C-Sunshine’s outreach system supporting expansion

Context

C-Sunshine is a software company specializing in custom e-commerce solutions, development capacity outsourcing, data analytics, and full-stack engineering. As part of their own growth and ongoing business development activities, they needed a fully self-hosted mailing system running on a dedicated internal mail server, without relying on external SaaS tools. The primary goal was to retain full ownership and control over contact data and interaction data, while still being able to measure and analyze email-driven behavior using standard analytics tools.

The system was designed primarily for internal and B2B communication, supporting sales and partnership outreach where transparency, data control, and simplicity were more important than complex marketing automation features. Given C-Sunshine’s technical focus and emphasis on data-driven decision-making, the solution had to be reliable, auditable, and easily extensible within their existing technical ecosystem.

Challenge

The main challenge was to design a solution that would:

  • Provide email delivery from a dedicated internal mail server
  • Create a structured data layer for contacts (email, address, city, country, ZIP code)
  • Track individual recipient interactions via unique links
  • Store detailed metadata for each interaction (timestamp, IP address, device type, browser)
  • Enable integration with Google Tag Manager and Google Analytics
  • Remain minimalistic, easy to maintain, and free of unnecessary complexity

A key constraint was that no customer or interaction data should be deleted, and the system should avoid over-engineering.

Mail system architecture scheme

Solution

We designed and implemented a custom mailing system composed of three tightly connected layers: infrastructure, backend & data, and analytics.

Mailing Infrastructure

Emails are sent from a dedicated internal mail server. Each email contains tracking links with unique tokens, allowing precise identification of recipients and their interactions.

Backend & Data Layer

A lightweight PHP backend (Laravel/Nette-compatible) was built on top of a PostgreSQL database.

The database structure includes:

  • Customer table
    • Email address and basic identification data
    • Two unique tokens generated per customer and appended to email links
  • Entry table
    • Records every link click
    • Stores timestamp, customer ID, token used
    • Captures IP address, device type, and browser information from HTTP headers
    • Supports repeated clicks without artificial limits

The admin interface allows:

  • Viewing and managing customers
  • Adding individual customers manually
  • Bulk importing customers from CSV files
  • Inspecting interaction data per customer

No deletion logic or complex workflows were introduced, keeping the system intentionally simple and robust. Mail server hosting was established using WebSupport, while adopting open source interface Roundcube on top.

Preview of mail system deployed into production

Analytics integration

Each tracked interaction is forwarded from the backend to Google Tag Manager, which then propagates events into Google Analytics. This enables correlation between:

  • Email interactions
  • Website behavior
  • Device and location data

As a result, email performance can be analyzed directly within the existing analytics stack used by C-Sunshine.

Great team to work with. Highly professional. They genuinely love what they do, and it shows in the quality of their work.
– Jozef Szadvari, CEO at C-Sunshine

Automation of client business development

Following the successful delivery of the mailing system, our cooperation with C-Sunshine naturally expanded into their sales and business development operations. The solution became an integral part of their internal workflow and has been actively used by our own team as well, allowing us to directly experience, refine, and optimize the system in real-world sales scenarios. Over the years, we have continued to support C-Sunshine by automating business development outreach, streamlining sales processes, and helping identify new revenue opportunities. What began as a technical implementation evolved into a long-term partnership focused on scalable sales growth, data-driven decision-making, and continuous improvement of their commercial operations.

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