HTML Bulkmail

(Darren Johnston) #1

Hi ,
has anyone used matrix bulkmail feature for sending out html newsletters?



we use it for mailing editors but not much else at the moment.

Its quite easy to setup an asset listing with the extra html tags wrapped in, the whole thing could be auto generated each week.



but as Squiz dont seem to use it management think its not up to the task!

(Nic Hubbard) #2

[quote]
has anyone used matrix bulkmail feature for sending out html newsletters?

[/quote]



Absolutely I have. Been using it to send out weekly HTML newsletters for our College for the last 5 years.



What sort of questions did you have?

(Darren Johnston) #3

Hi Nic,

  • any issues with large quantities >5000
    [*]any problems with using html and matrix design file i.e. we need to customise the code (in-line css) so that it displays correctly in different email clients
    [*]images will be located in matrix site
    [*]any other issues you may have found
(Nic Hubbard) #4

[quote]any issues with large quantities >5000

  • any problems with using html and matrix design file i.e. we need to customise the code (in-line css) so that it displays correctly in different email clients
    [*]images will be located in matrix site
    [*]any other issues you may have found

[/quote]

- Our weekly list is about 1000 users, so I guess I have never tested it it with over 5000, but I don't see why that shouldn't work well.
- No problems using HTML and a "clean" Matrix design file. I have spent hours and hours crafting the emails to work in all email clients.
- We use ./?a= style links for images in our newsletters
- No other issues that I have found! It works very well.
(Darren Johnston) #5

thanks Nic

(Karl Davidson) #6

[quote]
Its quite easy to setup an asset listing with the extra html tags wrapped in, the whole thing could be auto generated each week.

[/quote]



Hi Darren,



Not sure if Asset Listings work with bulkmail, have you got them work OK? That’s the only issue I see from an authoring perspective.



The things that are missing from the Bulkmail asset class of Squiz Matrix center around analytics and list management.



The analytics may be got around with some carefully crafted Google Analytics associated with images fetched from the source server.



List management is a tricky one as email addresses may become dormant and it would be nice to ensure you are not wasting resources sending emails to recipients that are no longer using the registered email address.



Subscribe and Unsubscribe is all pretty easily handled using built in Squiz Matrix functionality.



Most of the well known email distribution platforms (MailChimp and Campaign Monitor spring to mind) handle both of these ‘measurement and maintenance’ issues very well.



MailChimp has an excellent RSS feed integration API that works well to give you the dynamic composition of an asset listing (that outputs RSS XML) and the measurement and maintenance features of an email distribution platform, details can be found here: http://mailchimp.com/features/rss-to-email/

(Darren Johnston) #7

Hi Karl,


have not tested the asset listings that much but cannot see why they would not work.



List management - we grab email details from LDAP so no issue there, or can import a csv list.



We are currently using Campaign Monitor for external mail campaigns.



Analytic s would be another issue to contend with.



This would be more for emails where content exists in Matrix (News) to avoid extra time transferring data over.





thanks