Newsletter

Newsletter is a plugin made to collect subscribers to a blog newsletter and to send such newsletters. I’m not talking about the newsletters like the feedburner or subscribe 2 one. I’m talking about real newsletter written by hand. In the plugin adin panel there are a composer to create your newsletters with a visual editor.

Newsletter is still under development and there are a number of bug or misconfiguration I’m slowly resolving.

To configure this plugin you need to deeply understand the process to subscribe, confirm subscription, unsubscribe users. It’s not so obvious, so before ask for support, please read all this page!

Newsletter Plugin is not an alternative of FeedBurner. Read more here.

Contents

• Composing emails
• Newsletter Extras

Quick start

I have many doubts that a quick start guide can be useful, but I even know many people don’t like to read and understand well how to successfully use a plugin.

• install Newsletter
• create a page for  newsletter subscription and put in the content the short code [ newsletter ] (without inner spaces and lower case)
• open the page and copy the URL of that page
• insert it in Newsletter configuration panel and save
• subscribe to your own newsletter going to the subscription page you created, just for a test
• that’s all folks

Help and  Support

There is a post dedicated to send questions and get answers.

Download

The plugin is available on WordPress Plugin Directory:

http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/newsletter/

Have I to update

Many times people ask them self if they have or not to update Newsletter to a new version (usually is WordPress plugins panel that offers such opportunity). Sometime update can be risky, specially if I have introduced new features that may be buggy. So, before update, check articles tagged newsletter to see what’s changed.

Learning email marketing

Having a plugin like Newsletter is not enough if you don’t know how to build email marketing campaigns (if it’s in your business). Here some books you can evaluate (and with very low prices):

• Email Marketing: An Hour a Day
• Successful Email Marketing Strategies
• The Complete Guide to E-mail Marketing: How to Create Successful, Spam-free Campaigns to Reach Your Target Audience and Increase Sales
• The New Rules of Marketing and PR: How to Use News Releases, Blogs, Podcasting, Viral Marketing and Online Media to Reach Buyers Directly

Setting up the subscription page

Waiting to collect enough to write a decent official page for my newsletter plugin, some words are needed to explain it’s setup. After installing and activating the plugin (as we do with any other plugin) we firstly need to create a newsletter page.

So follow the steps below:

• open the Pages menu (on the left of your WP admin area) and press “add new”
• give a title to the new page, something like “newsletter subscription”
• put in the page content the tag [ newsletter ] (with NO spaces between the square brackets and the word “newsletter”)
• publish the page

The page will get a permalink: we need it to configure the newsletter plugin. May be in the future I can “automate” this step. The permalink can be something like http://www.satollo.com/english/newsletter. You can open your new page and copy the address from your browser. I hope this step is not complicate for people which would use and send newsletters…

The address has to be added on the newsletter configuration. See the picture below (click to enlarge to the real size):

Subscription process

We can discuss subscription process for days. I chose a double opt in process, just because in Italy seems the privacy rules (and laws) require it. I really don’t know if it’s true and if we need to make our life complicated to protect dumb people who press “subscribe” without reading disclaimer, rules and notes.

So the subscription process can be broken up in the steps below:

1. a user lands on the newsletter page: this is the subscription step where the users are asked for name and email
2. he types in his data and press “subscribe”: this is the first opt in
3. a message is shown in the page saying the data was stored and an email sent to confirm the subscription
4. the user checks his mailbox and finds a confirmation email with a link to be followed to activate the subscription
5. the user press that link and a “subscription confirmed” message is shown

Text shown in steps 1, 3, 5 are fully customizable within the newsletter configuration panel.

Look at the pictures below. Labels on admin panel HAVE to be change to be more clear… be patience… (click to enlarge).

The subscription form

The subscription form is automatically added inside the newsletter page  just below the introductory text you are free to modify within the configuration panel.

In the pictures below an example of newsletter page as it appears on the subscription step and the configuration panel where to modify the introductory text.

The green box identify the text displayed and where to write it. Click on pictures to enlarge them.

The form is loaded from a language file, so it can be translated. The file depends on your blog language and is one of the ones you find under the folder languages with name xx_YY.php.

Single and double opt-in

Now you can force Newsletter to work in single opt-in mode, there is a check box on confirmation configuration. It means that a user who leave his email address will be saved as confirmed subscriber and will receive the welcome message.

Name and email or only email

By default, subscription form ask for name and email. On configuration panel you can specify to collect only the email address. This setting change the subscription form and the widget behaviour.

Widget

To add a subscription for on a sidebar, you can use the widget. Easy to install and configure, it’ the best way to have a subscription form on all pages.

Unsubscription

Unsubscription configuration now let the blog owner to set up a good bye email. If the email subject is empty, the email won’t be sent.

Testing, Simulating and Sending

First step first, do some tests. On Composer panel there are 10 email addresses that can be configured and that will be used while testing. Test the sending process on different account and test you newsletter theme on as many account as possible.

A test can show you if emails reach the recipient, if emails show up well.

When you have a list of subscribers you can simulate. Simulation means to send out a real newsletter to a test address. How it works? Newsletter will picks up all subscribers from database and compose the email for each of them. Then it sends out that email but forcing the email address (and only it) to the email address configured. Check the Composer panel for such configuration.

Sending. Nothing to say, a real newsletter sending process. No way back when you start a sending process.

Composing emails

The composer panel is rather complex even if at first it seems simple. Mainly the composer is used to create an email (newsletter issue) to be sent. All what is required is a little of fantasi to compose a subject and message body.

In the composer there is a visual editor with it’s advatages and it’s limits. I think for many of us a visual editor is the best choice: you can write, format, create tables, give styles. Just remeber that not all email client (desktop or online) shows text styles as you see them in an editor. Still there are many ways to insert style, inline, referring an exteral file and as an html tag inside a page. Some of them are respected by email client, other removed or totally ignored. This is why many newsletter themes use verbose “inline styles”.

The problem is not obvious, you can find some other info here.

Using visual editor is not only a matter of have it while cmposing, the system reacts in a different way if visual editor is enabled or disabled. Why and how?

Visual editor do not accept <style> blocks (any visual editor, no only TinyMCE), but themes can have (from version 1.4.7) an associated style.css file. So before sending, Newsletter Plugin loads the email body and the theme CSS, merges them and creates a single full HTML email. CSS used is determined by the last theme choosed, so even is you empty the editor content, that CSS will always be added.

If you need to force Newsletter to not use the theme CSS, simple choose the new “Blank” theme.

Avoiding visual editor

From version 1.4.7 you can disable the visual editor of composer and write the full html text of your email. Newsletter plugin, while sending, will use your email body AS-IS so you are free to make whatever you want. Having control of the html code, you can insert <style> blocks too, but be aware that not all email client will respect it.

To disable visual editor check the “Disable visual editor” checkbox and save. Remember to save!

Batches explained

One of the biggest problem with hosting provider are limits they impose on emails sent per hour. So there is a configuration where you can set the max number of email to be sent per batch. If the limit is reached, Newsletter stops the sending process and show a “batch info” with a button to restart the sending process.

Batch info box, shows the number of emails sent, the number of email still queued, the last subscriber email address and id processed. There is and internal system that tries to save batch state even when the system if stopped by errors or other provider limits. I did my best, but I know I won’t be enough…

For who has the Extras package, simulation and sending can be scheduled breaking the process on small batches started every 10 minutes. Combining this fragmentation with a maximum number of email per batch you can avoid to go over provider limits.

Importing contacts

May be a blogger already has a list of subscribers to be used. So there is the feature that permit to import such list of user.

The import process and the data needed is really simple: a csv formatted text with email and name. Using the “import” panel, just past the csv text in the textarea and press import.

The import process doesn’t check for YOUR data validity, but can give as a result a number of “error” lines.

A line is wrong, eg, when the email address in it is already in the database. Emails need to be unique.

The cvs format is:

info@satollo.com;Stefano Satollo
…

email and name has to be separated with a semicolon (yes I know the csv means “comma separated values”).

What about if  “I don’t have such a list”? You always can create it starting from a database, manually or playing with Excel.

Exporting

There is a specific sub page of Newsletter which lists out all subscribers in CVS format to be saved or processed elsewhere.

Themes

Version 1.4+ has a new theme system, made of PHP files that can be fully programmed. Newsletter comes with two themes stored on “themes” folder under the plugin folder.

Each theme has its own folder with (at least) a “theme.php” file inside. Just look at them as starting base to understand how they work and to create your own theme.

From version 1.4.7, theme system supports CSS. In a theme folder it’s possible to add a file named “style.css”. It has to be like a common CSS file for web sites.

When sending a newsletter issue, this CSS will be loaded and merged with message body. Be sure to read here to know more about how CSS are used by different email clients.

On composer paragraph it’s explained how CSS are treated while creating messages with or without the visual editor.

Theme folder has this format:

theme-folder-name
-- theme.php (mandatory)
-- style.css (optional)
-- [other files or folders]

To create a custom theme you MUST NOT modify the packaged themes, otherwise on next update the changes will be lost.

To customize Newsletter themes just create a folder named “newsletter-custom” inside the “wp-content/plugins” folder. Inside that folder, create a “themes” folder and copy one of the packaged theme folder inside it. You may change the folder name as it’s used as theme name.

Those custom themes will be listed in composer page.

All theme files (usually images) need to be stored in theme folder.

I hope there will be some designers who want to share they newsletter themes, I’ll be happy to add them to Newsletter package.

Extras

Newsletter plugin can be extended with some extras. Newsletter Extras is a package that can be added to Newsletter free version to activate some features:

• statistics collection: every link on email is rewrite to track clicks on it showed on statistics subpanel
• scheduling: the ability to send out all emails breaking the list in small batches to by pass hosting provider limits
• custom subscription forms (hand coded for maximum personalization)
• statistics on custom fields collection

Newsletter Extras are ONLY for Satollo.net members. Check out the downloads area for other goods available to members.

Before buy

Before become member, be sure to read all paragraphs below and article linked. Read this article on Newsletter Plugin, FeedBurner and Other Services as well.

Newsletter Extras install

Installing Newsletter Extras is very simple. Download lastest version of the package from downloads area. Unzip it and inside the zip file you’ll find a folder named “newsletter-extras” with some .php file inside. Copy that folder in “wp-content/plugins” folder of you blog. That’s all.

Note: when you unzip the package the program you use to decompress can create a folder containing the “newsletter-extras”. You have to copy the latter on “wp-content/plugins”. The resulting “structure” will be:

wp-content
-- plugins
---- newsletter-extras
------ newsletter-extras.php
------ [other files]

Statistics

With Newsletter Extras package there are some statistics collected. Data saved on database is finely grained, but the data show, till now, is a little bit raw. Here an example of statistics from my Italian site:

To collect statistics there are two mandatory configurations: a newsletter name has to be specified on Composer and the check box “track link clicks” must be checked.

Scheduler

Many providers impose strict restrictions on the number of emails can be sent from one account, for example 200 emails per hour. Clearly whe a newsletter is sent “one shot” the limit is quickly reached and the overall sending process fails (without notice).

To solve that problem Newsletter can be configured (in composer panel) with a maximum number of emails per batch. When that limit is reached the sending process stops and can be restarted manually. With Newsletter Extras there a second set of options to setup a scheduled sending process. Emails are sent in small batch (batch size can be configured) and on intervals of configurable number of minutes.

So if your provider has a limit of 200 emails per hour, the scheduler can be configure with an interval of 10 minutes and a batch size of 30 emails.

Read more about Scheduler on Newsletter Extras Scheduler Notes.

Finally check Premium articles since from time to time I write posts to explore Newsletter usages and configurations.

Versions

In deep notes on version can be found under tag “newsletter“. Versions description may be missing in this page section. Use the previous link to have full documentation.

Remember the plugin firstly load the en_US.php file and then the one specific for the blog language.

If you want to customize the form, it’s simple: do not modify the file provided with the plugin. Insted, create a folder named “newsletter” under the folder “wp-content”, and a subfolder “languages”. Copy the language file you want to start with under the latter folder and rename it “custom.php”. Change the content as you like.

Why put the file sin that folder? Because when you upgrade the plugin, WordPress delete the original folder!