Compass Designs .net

A modern website, especially one that is driven by a content management system should be using email to communication with your site visitors. To help you find out which email marketing solution is best for you, we will review various Joomla email newsletters and some other non-Joomla email systems. We will look at both features based on desired functionality and features that are needed to conform to CAN-SPAM requirements.

Find the Best Email Newsletter for your Joomla Website

A Review of Email Marketing Newsletters Available for Joomla

A modern website, especially one that is driven by a content management system should have many tools that allow two way communication with your site visitors. A key part of this communication is the use of email newsletters. Many people associate email marketing just with spam, but email can fill many needs, for example:

• Follow up emails from ecommerce purchases
• Communicating with family members on a family web site
• Sequential ebooks about a particular topic
• A news and tips email from a topic niche site

Recently RSS has become more popular to send information to subscribers, but it is only really adopted by few web users. Most still are using their inbox to get information. I actually use a RSS to email system from Feedblitz on my site.

To help you find out which email marketing solution is best for you, we will review various Joomla email newsletters and some other non-Joomla email systems. We will look at both features based on desired functionality and features that are needed to conform to CAN-SPAM requirements.

A email newsletter should contain the following features (in no particular order):

• Reliable sending mechanism
  If you have gone to the trouble of getting visitors to subscribe, your email newsletter needs to be sent reliably. Pause/resuming the sending is a very useful feature to help make sure you emails get out.
• Ability to throttle sending
  Sending email can be resource intensive for your server. Having emails sent out with delays after X sent is called throttling. It also can overcome forced web host email sending caps
• Unsubscribe mechanism
  For you email to be legal, it must meet the CAN-SPAM act requirement of having an easy unsubscribe mechanism
• Subscribe form
  You need to be able to offer site visitors to subscribe to your email list
• Double opt in
  Recognized as an industry best practice, it is advised to ask subscribers to confirm their email subscription by some manner, eg. clicking on a link sent to that email.
• Multiple lists
  Very useful if you have different lists for different topics/purposes
• Bounce handling
  Emails might bounce for many reasons. Its important for these to be automatically removed from your list as repeat bounces from a particular server can get you flagged as a spammer (blacklisted) by ISP's
• HTML templating
  Current research indicates that html emails have a greater response rate that pure text. They also allow easy tracking of "opens"
• Import/Export subscribers
  As your needs change, you might well need to change your email newsletter system. You'll need to be able to easily import and export your subscriber list. You will also want to have some sort of duplicate handling.
• Integration into Joomla user database
  Many sites will have registration set up on their Joomla site for many reasons, ecommerce, private pages, paid subscription. You will often want send emails to your user database.
• Email Statistics
  Its very important to be able to track statistics about your newsletters, such as open and click rates.

This is by no means an exhaustive list, but is what I would consider a minimum list to both meet federal legal requirements for email marketing and for an email marketing solution that compliments the Joomla CMS. We will examine email newsletters that are available as Joomla components and ones that are external to Joomla.

One important consideration that you will need to immediately take into account is how your website is hosted. Most www.aweber.com.

To a certain extent, this does immediately question the usefulness of Joomla email newsletters. If you have big lists, or hope that you will, you will be needing a dedicated server to make use of them.