Hi all
I know we touched on newsletter modules at the last meet-up - but now I have a project that will require a newsletter. If I'd known this last week, I would have asked more questions!!! So following from what we discussed, I have done a bit of research and there is loads of ways to create and send newsletters, so I'm looking for peoples opinions of what good and what they are using.
In terms of what I need to be able to do:
When contributors post articles to the website, they can tag the article as suitable for inclusion on the newsletter.
The moderator then at the end of each week/month will review the list of tagged articles to be included, decide which to include/not include and order them as he sees fit.
He may also wish to add extra elements to the newsletter (most likely input an introduction to the newsletter)
Then when he sends the newsletter, it will send his intro followed by summaries and links to each of the articles below to approx 5,000 users. These articles would then be untagged so would not appear on the next newsletter.
Given the number of users, I'm guessing that the only real option is outsource the sending of the emails to Mandrill/MailChimp.
I would appreciate your experience using the various newsletter modules out there
Thanks a mil
Frank
Comments
Simple News
Hi Frank,
that's not a number that would rule out sending from a Drupal install. You can use cron to schedule batches to send. It mightn't be instantaneous, but with some extra server resources you might get through the list soon enough. It would be worth discussing this with your hosting company. Simplenews, Views and EVA should see you through the initial set up. From what I understand of your requirements, a lot is going to be down to Views.
Hope this helps. Let us know how you get on.
Conor
DrupalCon Dublin 2016
http://dublin2016.drupal.org
http://www.drupal.ie/map
Cheers Conor - yes I was
Cheers Conor - yes I was thinking that Views & EVA would handle the bulk of the content work. Glad to hear 5k users is not unrealistic from Drupal install - will look into it. What's a realistic batch quantity to send to avoid being tagged as spam?
F
3rd party SMTP server
Just to add, you're probably going to have to use a 3rd party SMTP server like Mandrill or MailJet. If you use the server's default SMTP server, emails will tend to be flagged as spam in the user's inbox. There's some extra information that these providers add to the email header. For smaller volumes you could use Google Apps which has a 2000 emails/day limit. You can use SMTP Authentication Support module (https://www.drupal.org/project/smtp) to connect to a 3rd party SMTP server.
Mark
batch size vs frequency
Hi Frank,
It's really down to the server resources, which is why it'd be good to talk to your hosting company. Off the top of my head, a couple of hundred emails every few minutes will clear your number in less than an hour. And tweaking cron with contributed modules might help get more out of your existing hosting. Sending from an email address with the same domain as the website will help a little with the risk of being flagged as spam.
Best of luck
Conor
DrupalCon Dublin 2016
http://dublin2016.drupal.org
http://www.drupal.ie/map
3rd party
I'd reiterate Markh - even if you do the email with Drupal, use a 3rd party system like Mandrill or Sendgrid to actually send the mail.
Takes a little setup, especially at DNS level, but you'll be rewarded with reliable sending and better 'spam scores'.
Are there newsletter modules
Are there newsletter modules or tips to enable unique urls for analytics afterwards so its possible to identify traffic that came from the 2nd newsletter send to group b for example?
MailChimp
One approach I can think of is to use the MailChimp modules (https://www.drupal.org/project/mailchimp) which provide statistics like percentage who opened the newsletter and percentage who clicked on links. You can use Drupal nodes as newsletters using the MailChimp Campaign sub-module (https://www.drupal.org/project/mailchimp_campaign). Mailchimp Signup sub-module provides a sign-up form which could be a block on your site.
Mailchimp provide A/B testing
Mailchimp provide A/B testing out of the box: http://mailchimp.com/features/ab-testing/ on a custom campaign.
They also have subject line testers etc. And tips on spam filtering you would need to be aware of when sending bulk mail.
Regarding this use case, I
Regarding this use case, I would:
- Create a view using fields and perhaps nodequeue to create your curated list of articles.
- In terms of managing the items feed you could filter by date or otherwise depending on article frequency.
- Add an RSS feed for this view. I guess you could attach the intro or sticky that and ensure it is published before the scheduled date newsletter obviously.
- Use mailchimp to deliver the feed on a scheduled date.
Mailchimp will provide the heavy lifting of templating, managing signups and sending. And also reporting that other systems would also provide.
That’s the mostly automated approach, as experience tells me that’s the best with crowd-sourced content (who wants to fill their days with writing newsletters). However you could easily substitute a feed for a regular view to use as a foundation to build a manual newsletter if customisation is client’s wish.
I have an idea. can we build
I have an idea. can we build a Drupal distro that plugs into SendGrid for sending email to a list?
the benefit could be, we can configure Drupal to get contents from an RSS feed and format it properly then send the email. this could be useful for ecommerce websites.
Hadi Farnoud
فروشگاه ساز | ایمیل مارکتینگ پاکت
I came across this article
I came across this article this morning. I haven't read it, but the title of it looks like it might do what you want.
http://getlevelten.com/blog/kristin-brinner/how-use-views-rss-create-mai...
Mark Conroy,
Lead Frontend Developer,
Annertech - Web Agency of the Year 2016.