Collecting Profile Data On Newsletter Subscription

Collection user data other than name and email can be very useful but can produce a lot of missing contacts. Why? Because people are tired to give they own personal information to anyone (or better they hate having such questions asked while they are proud to put everything of personal on Facebook).

Newsletter could collect such data since previous releases than 1.4.9 but I never documented it as it was experimental. It’s still experimental but just a little bit more stable.

Note: there is no way to visual design or configure subscription forms to collect other fields that email and name. Newsletter has a ways to store such extended data, but not features to easily create the form.

How can we do that? With Newsletter Extras package there is a panel called “Forms” where to code what is needed.

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Let’s start.

First a justification. Why I have not built a visual form builder? The answer is easy… it’s not easy, it’s not a core feature for Newsletter, it wouldn’t left space to form building creativity.

On new panel called “Forms” there are 10 text areas where put some HTML code representing a subscription form. Yes you need to know HTML to use them, but on the bottom of the panel there are two (more in the future) examples of HTML form code ready to be copied and modified.

An example: I want to change the labels “Your name” and “Your email” in something different. All that is needed is to copy the first example on the first text area and change the labels. Then we need to say to Newsletter there is a different form to be used.

Open the subscription page where there is the tag [ newsletter ] and add an attribute (this is the way they are called by coders):

[ newsletter form="1" ]

You’re saying to Newsletter to use form 1 configured on “Forms” panel. Same syntax can be used on [ newsletter_form ] short code used to embed a subscription form on pages and posts.

Newsletter widget has a new field called “form number” where you can specify a form to be used for the widget.

Hand coded forms needed to contain not only the fields to collect name and email, but there are some other “hidden” fields and placeholder required to make the machine work. If you just copy and past one of the examples it’s enough.

How to collect some profile data. Suppose you want to ask if subscriber is male or female. Newsletter on subscription phase, checks if there are additional values to store in subscriber profile. Those additional fields are named

np[NAME]

(“np” stands for “nerwsletter profile”). To give a real example, the one below is a text field to ask the phone number:

<input type=”text” name=”np[phone]“/>

Additional profile fields are stored in a new database table and I’m working to export function to extract them.

Actually profile data are only collected as pure information, I have in plan to create filters to send messages only to subscribe with specific profile values.

On statistics panel there is already a function to make a simple analysis over profile data. You can choose a profile field and have a statistic on how subscribers are distributed over fields values. Eg. if you collect subscribers sex you can know how many males and females you have in your list.

There is a special profile field automatically collected by Newsletter, called “_referrer”. The leading underscore marks a field as “reserved” by Newsletter.

Referrer is the page where user inserted his email and name and started the subscription process. When you have subscription forms everywhere in your blog, you may wonder which is the page from where the great part of users subscribe. The statistics over “_referrer” field gives such information.

Just to say, the great part of my subscribers come form admin panels of my plugins!!!

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