How to make your email marketing fun, with a Joomla twist
A many of you know, we loooove using Mailchimp for our newsletters! But…the integration with Joomla honestly left us with more to wish for. Sure, it was possible to use Mailchimps API to do some nice things, but let’s face it, if you’re going to run a member-driven site, these things should be seamless.
Joomla and Mailchimp just wasn’t the perfect couple…until now. A big
thank you goes out to the FreakedOut team for making it happen!
Last year, the FreakedOut team created Joomailer, which merged the power of the
CampaignMonitor email marketing system with Joomla. This made it possible to manage your website and CampaignMonitor driven email marketing from one admin control panel. Pretty sweet, we thought…but we still had our hearts set only on Mailchimp.
To our surprise, the FreakedOut team recently contacted us and said
“We’ve got something you’ll love!”. Working together with MailChimp, FreakedOut have created a new version of Joomailer which integrates with our favorite Chimp. Yay! Best of all, the component is
100% free!
Yes, this blog post is completely dedicated to Mailchimp and Joomailer, and after reading it you might actually change from your current email marketing system to Mailchimp. ;)
“Easy for noobs, strong for Ninjas”
The key for us is: Mailchimp makes email marketing fun. Yes, really! From the funny welcome messages when you’re logged in, to the fact that you have more email marketing features available than you can shake a banana at.
“So how does this Joomla and Mailchimp integration work?” I thought you’d never ask:
STEP 1: get started with a free MailChimp account and create an API key.
STEP 2: head over to “Mailchimp meets Joomla” and sign up.
Sneak peek of Joomailers "Getting Started" screen in Joomla
Features and benefits of Joomailer
Memberships and subscriptions
First of all, you can synchronize your existing site members with the MailChimp member database. When that’s done and dusted, your new site members can subscribe directly via:
- the standard Joomla registration form,
- Jomsocial, or
- Community Builder
Creating and sending newsletters
Sending out a newsletter with Joomailer is simple:
First, choose your template.
Creating your newsletter and setting up the basics
choose your subscriber list.
Create different lists for your members and send focused campaigns
select which articles you’d like to include. You can even choose to send just the article intro-text, and automatically include a read-more link back to the article on the site.
A few clicks and you are done. Re-using your existing website content gives you more time to monkey around with other things
– you’re ready to send!
Your dashboard
From the Joomailer dashboard you can quickly access your campaigns and account details (plus checking out the latest Chimp Chatter).
Reports
When your email campaign has landed in your subscribers inboxes, it’s time to check the stats. Mailchimp truly rocks when it comes to quickly see open rates, click rates, bounces and many other interesting numbers.
Just make sure you don’t spend too much time staring at the numbers without taking action based on them. ;) Continously improve your opening and click rates, for example by using the super easy A/B split testing to see what works or not for your different lists.
Take the first steps towards improving your email marketing!
STEP 1: get started with a free MailChimp account and create an API key.
STEP 2: head over to “Mailchimp meets Joomla” and sign up. Did we mention the Joomailer is 100% free! ;)
Tags: eMarketing, Joomla, mailchimp, Recommended Services
We are in love with everything web and embrace technology as a means to drive social change.
Thats brilliant. About time somebody made the integration tighter and more robust.
Awesome write up @Tess.
Awesome plugin! Time to set up a free mailchimp account!
Would like to see option to grab content from jomsocial (updates from groups, videos, photos…).
@enrico hold on tight ;) we are not done yet. Our first goal was to get an equivalent of our joomailer for campaignmonitor component out. Please feel free to post your ideas in more detail in our forum on the http://www.joomailer.com site.
much appreciated.
@matt thx for your positive and motivating comments
Cheers,
Alexis
freakedout.de
joomailer.com
.-= alexis´s last blog ..Corks and Confetti – Mailchimp in the House =-.
Wow! Its been awhile since I get my hands dirty with Joomla and Morph (no thanks to my day job which takes ALL of my leisure time recently :((( ). The very next time I get myself updated, I see this!!!11
Big hands to Joomailer for this awesome component and nice little write-up Tess ;)
Send my regards to Prothemer team!
So this only works with com_content right? Not k2 and what not? Or I am not making any sense here? :P
Hi Ajmal,
Welcome back to the wonderful world of webdevelopment passion and innovation! ;)
I see your membership had expired, so I activated your free ‘fall-back’ subscription, so you can login and renew if you want. Just make sure you add the voucher code RENEW when you renew via your membership page, which gives you the 15% renewal discount (for our existing members)
Take care,
Tess and the whole team
.-= Tess´s last blog ..How to make your email marketing fun- with a Joomla twist =-.
Tess,
Oh, about that, I am very sorry since I knew I wouldnt have enough time for Joomla (and of course its extensions), I opted out to take some time off web development (reason why I didnt update any of Joomla’s extension subscriptions). I am looking for a new day job that really respects their work hour policy (8 hours per day; 9 to 5 kind of job) since the one I am having now really kills me even on the weekends :(
Anyway, while doing that I am trying to update myself with Joomla and Morph (I know there’s ALOT to catch up!) :)
About the discount, that is soo nice of you and Prothemer! Can’t thank you enough. Many thanks again!
Thank you so much Amy for mentioning this post on your blog! :)
Hi Ajmal,
it works with K2 contents as well. And lets you synchronize existing CB and Jomsocial users. No more import export stuff. And we are working making the newsletter checkbox on the registration form work better.
Cheerios,
Alexis
.-= alexis´s last blog ..Corks and Confetti – Mailchimp in the House =-.
Hi Alexis,
Thanks for the reply and info. Wow I must say this is super awesome and impressive. Looks like it is very well-thought extension. I am definitely not gonna miss it in action ;)
thank you for your kind words, looking forward to seeing you on our forum, making suggestions from a user-perspective. :)
Alexis
.-= alexis´s last blog ..Mailchimp meets Joomla – Teaser =-.
Excellent component, self explanatory and easy to configure. Very impressive report functionality as well.
Looks good. I will definitely going to try this out.
I think what you posted was actually very logical. But, what about this? suppose you were to write a killer title? I mean, I don’t wish to tell you how to run your website, however suppose you added something to possibly get a person’s attention? I mean How to make your email marketing fun, with a Joomla twist – ProThemer Team Blog is a little boring. You might glance at Yahoo’s home page and watch how they write post titles to grab viewers to open the links. You might add a related video or a related picture or two to grab readers excited about what you’ve got to say. Just my opinion, it would make your posts a little livelier.
I actually Think that post, “How to make your email
marketing fun, with a Joomla twist – ProThemer Team Blog” was just right!
I reallycannot see eye to eye with you even more!
At last looks like I actuallyuncovered a website very well worth browsing.
Many thanks, Beatriz
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