The client I'm working with right now wants to do email marketing. As I am nowhere near being a module developer, my basic questions, for anyone who has had any experience with this, are: Can Drupal handle automated mailing campaigns? What are it's limitations? Is it easier to integrate with an existing product? e.g. Infusionsoft www.infusionsoft.com
We've got the customer and user information (email) in Drupal already so it seems like managing subscriptions would be easier (for them AND us) if it were part of the site, plus we already need to have some automated email functionality developed for this project...
- Customer, upon purchasing a certain multi day service and indicating the day they want to start, will receive a form email each of the days they receive the service, and then a follow up email at a later date.
I'm picturing a node type called an "announcement" that would actually include any/all types of announcements including an email, blog entry, facebook post, tweet, rss etc., it would also include filters for various customer attributes e.g. customer rank, locality, source etc. so that the announcement could be targeted to specific customer groups, and/or a specific address(es) could be input. A date and time could be set for the dispatch of the announcement, and this could be set automatically in the case of automated emails mentioned earlier.
So basically this node would sit there and wait for a certain date/time to occur and then either it would publish itself to the site or dispatch an email or both... and log that in one of its fields. Other events on the site could automatically set the date/time and recipients of an announcement, so like a basic one would be if someone successfully signs up for the newsletter, a welcome "announcement" email would be sent the the address within a few seconds.
I have some other cool stuff I'd like for it to do, but this is the general idea... maybe it's the wrong approach, but in general is this functionality feasible?? Can you pull it off? Are you for hire? :) Thanks for any feedback!!
Comments
Hello
Hello.
There are a lot of different module for notificating users, like: Notify, Subscritpions. But there is one general limitation - they could not handle a real huge emails distribution.
Looks like you need to look at Vertical Response and iContact modules that drives a third party email marketing solutions.
Thanks for the response! I
Thanks for the response! I checked out those modules and tried to contact the vendors (sales and support closed weekends tho)... hoping they have examples of their system in action.
As for the modules you mentioned:
What would be considered "real huge"? I definitely want to be able to scale this thing as big as it wants to get. What would break down at a larger scale with the use of these modules?
And when you say "general limitation" are you referring to the existing modules you mentioned, or to a limitation of Drupal that would make it fundamentally impossible to achieve?
Not at all, as a "real huge"
Not at all, as a "real huge" I`m considering a databases with a huge number of emails, thousands of emails. With a Vertical Response or iContact this would not lead to any troubles, but Notifications, Notify, Subscriptions module could lead your website to spam ban or high server load.
Anyway, I think you should read descriptions of every module and take one you need to try on.
I suggest you check out
I suggest you check out PHPList and the PHPList integration model. PHPList is it's own separate mailing list application. You can have separate lists, attributes (name, physical address, other preferences) and then send out e-mails to just one list, every list, people with a given attribute, etc. You can send both text and html emails.
The PHPList integration module will log in to your Drupal database and create PHPList accounts for each user account. The user can then select which list they would like to subscribe to from their Druapl user profile. Asking the users to select the list they would like to be on is good to help you segment your users.
There is no integration with Drupal content, and that is fine with me. For HTML e-mails you be using tables if if you want it to look good, and all other types of considerations like that. I have been using PHPList (without the Drupal integration) for about 6 months sending out e-mails once a week to a list with 10,000 addresses and it works great. For this list I am using Media Temple DV 3.0 which has no e-mail limit restrictions. It does take about 2.5 hours to send them all out. I am now working on a new project to build a list with Drupal so I can have call-to-actions that have to do with their account (e-commerce, etc). It is not as easy as using something like Infusionsoft, Constant Contact, Vertical Response, iContact, ChimpMail, etc but it's free.
The decision has been made to
The decision has been made to run with infusionsoft. Because of the ASAP nature of the situation, drupal development of this kind is out of the question. Were we to start from scratch, I assume could we run it on severs separate from the website... configured for high qty esmtp action.. right?
anywho...
we are just going to run infusion soft as-is and switch over our newsletter sign-up block like any other web site would do. It seems like a quality package. Meanwhile the development will begin on the integration... which I will try to keep updated on this thread..
here is what I've come across so far...
http://drupal.org/node/547796
http://drupal.org/node/764190
thanks to @cr0ss and @nsputnik for weighing in :)
Take a look at Infusionlink module
If you're using Infusionsoft, you are welcome to use my Infusionlink module as a work-in-progress -- see http://drupal.org/node/922964. It supports automatic creation of Infusionsoft users (Person records) when Drupal user accounts are created, and automatic triggering of Infusionsoft action sequences (which can send emails, tag users, start/stop follow-up sequences, etc.) when users do various things on the Drupal site. It uses the Infusionsoft XML-RPC API.
If you have a database of users in the Drupal site already, you might need a little more PHP code to run through these user accounts and create or update the Person records in Infusionsoft. Note, I'm not a Drupal consultant and don't have time for any custom work - but anyone who IS a Drupal consultant, or just a good PHP programmer, could easily use the code examples for user accounts on drupal.org, and the code at http://drupal.org/node/922964, to do this very quickly.
Infusionsoft API module
Also the infusionsoft API module can now accomplish this.
It allows for a much faster development timeline between drupal and infusionsoft.
It may allow you to do some of this configuration without writing code via triggers/actions or rules module.
http://joshuaellinger.com