For a newsletter /marketing tool, you might also want to take a look at Interspire Email Marketer 5.0:
http://www.interspire.com/emailmarketer/
The functionality looks pretty impressive.
A full integration with Magento would be good - but of course a fully integrated custom-built newsletter / marketing tool for magento that Ajazza has in the works is probably even better. But I imagine this is a BIG project (for one developer)?
Has anyone used Dreamweaver to create a newsletter? I’m thinking that it would be a fairly simple way to get newsletters created and published. I know that I’m desperately needing them now to market to my customers buy I’m having trouble getting started.
@Dekard you can use Dreamweaver to compose your HTML newsletter content, however you will need another service such as Aweber, Constant Contact or the Magento Newsletter Templates to actually do the sending.
This thread is more about taking the data sitting in your Magento DB and filtering the results to create a targeted newsletter based on those results. For example, I want to know all customers that have purchased XYZ in the last two weeks, and then create an email, like asking them to create a review for the product that they purchased, or offering them a complimentary product and then sending that personalised email to them.
They’re not free open-source solutions, but like ExpressionEngine, they are matured, focussed, and powerful tools that would be a great integration with Magento. The key would be tight integration with the Magento data model and business rules. If anyone has experience integrating an advanced email marketing platform, I’d love to hear about it.
In the long run, I think Magento is best served by affiliating with other select, established open source applications; as opposed to user submissions. (No offense. There’s some very talented folk here in the community. But, why not go with something already developed and proven?)
In the newsletter category, the affiliation for me would be PHPlist. Full featured. Well established. Maintained by its own community. Another CMS, Joomla, offers an extension that creates a bridge to PHPlist. To incorporate this in Magento, you’d probably have two separate databases (not necessarily a bad thing for security reasons). The bridge extension might add an INSERT command in the registration area; causing new customer contact info to insert both into Magento and into PHPlist.
I’ve used PHPlist for over a year and am satisfied. HTML and text emails look great. The stats identify which users open the emails, which links they clicked, automatic purging of bounced emails, plus overall stats. Like any PHP registration form, there are bots and individuals frequently making SQL penetration tests. So, the overall security of your customer database and your web pages can hinge on the login or app creator.
@websitebob: I agree with you and hope Magneto can integrate with a established open source email marketing system, sooner than later.
What I would like to add is that it should have autoresponders. I have looked through PHPlist, and could not see that they use autoresponders at this time.
Does any other open source application come with that?