A good way to increase your site's traffic and inform your site's visitors about new content are the newsletters. Modules Newsletter and Newsletter Popup are 2 e-mail marketing solutions you should take a look. Both are free and can be downloaded from elxis.net. Lately module Newsletter updated to version 2.0 which generates automatically beautiful HTML newsletters and provides you an advanced administration interface which is easy to use. On the other hand module Newsletter Popup is an eye-catching app for accepting new registrations for your newsletter. In this article we will focus on some features of these modules and provide you a few tips.

Newsletter dispatch mode

Module Newsletter has 4 dispatch modes.

• Automatic: The module sends automatically new content added at the web site during the period you specify. This can be once per month, once per week, or daily. On monthly newsletters the e-mails get send at the 1st day of each month and contain the content added during the previous month. On weekly newsletter the e-mails get send once per week on a day you specify (Monday, Tuesday, etc). And finally, the daily newsletters get send every day. Off course no emails get send if there is no new content added. In automatic dispatch mode the source of the content can be: Articles, EDC listings, Mikro blog posts, Open Shop products and Bubbles forum topics.
• File: This mode is super cool for e-mail marketing campaigns. For example if you own a shop with clothes, you can send an email informing your subscribers about your summer collection. In Files mode you write your custom HTML or TEXT newsletter in a file, upload this file to the module and send it manually whenever you want to your subscribers. There are several sites which provide free email templates in order to create a nice HTML newsletter. Here are a few of them: beefree.io, unlayer.com, stripo.email, campaignmonitor.com and moosend.com. Tip: If you use such a template upload all the images you are going to use in a folder of your site and replace local linked images to the online ones with the full URLs. If you are unfimiliar with HTML code you can hire a professional to do this job for you. Is Open Source and Webgift.gr are 2 good options. When ready, to send the newsletter go to the Actions/Subscribers tab and click Send now!
• Manual: This mode is useful whenever you want to send a short message to your subscribers. Write your HTML code or TEXT, save module parameters, and then go to the Actions/Subscribers tab to send the newsletter like in File mode.
• Only collect e-mails, do not send newsletters: In this mode the module does not send any email. It just displays the form for someone to register.

Automatic dispatch options and tips

• Logo image: If you want to use a logo create a PNG image (720 pixels width, 150-250 pixels height), name it as newsletter_logo.png and uploaded to folder media/images. If you dont upload a logo the module displays site's title and a subtitle you provide (if you dont provide subtitle it uses site's META description).
• Colour palette: Customize the colours used in HTML newsletter.
• Limit: The maximum number of items of the same type (Articles, EDC listings, etc...) to include in each newsletter. Don't set it too high, especially if you use multiple sources as you will end with a very long e-mail.
• Other options / E-mails per run: The maximum number of e-mails to send on each run when sending newsletter (Automatic / File / Manual). If, for example, you have 500 subscribers, it is not wise to send 500 emails at once. The E-mails per run controls how many emails to send each time. We advice you to use a number between 20 and 40, but this depends on how many subscribers you have and the speed of your server.
• Other options / Time gap: Time in minutes between 2 successive dispatches, only relevant for Automatic mode. 5-10 minutes we believe is OK, avoid the 0 option. Consider you have 100 subscribers and you have selected to send 20 emails per run. If the time gap is 5, then the module will send 20 emails, wait 5 minutes, send 20 more, etc. In this example it will take, at least 20 minutes for all the emails to be send to all the 100 subscribers.

Other options

Hide module: Useful if you want to use the Newsletter Popup module for new users registration and dont want to display the Newsletter module but you want it's automatic Send functionality. In this scenario users will register in your newsletter from the Newsletter Popup module, and automatic (or file/manual) emails will be send by the Newsletter module without been visible (although it is published).

Currency: On Automatic mode if Open Shop is one of your enabled sources then set here the shop's currency. The default value is EUR.

Test your settings

Before you actually send a newsletter, ragerdless the selected mode, you can use the Test mode to send a newsletter to your self or to any email you specify. Go to tab Actions/Subscribers and on the Test mode block click Send. An email, following with the settings and the content you have selected, will be send to you. This is a very good way to test how your email will look like before actually sending it to your subscribers. We strongly advise you to use this function.

Newsletter Popup

This module does not send any e-mail. What it does is to display an eye-catching popup (actually modal) window and prompt site guests to register in site's newsletter. It can be integrated with module Newsletter, Open Shop, IOS Hotels, IOS Rentals, IOS AERO, or can work as a standalone module. When integrated with module Newsletter it adds guests email address in newsletter subscribers list. When integrated with Open Shop or an IOS Reservations booking extension it can generate a discount coupon upon successful guest subscription.

Download and support

Both modules are free and can be downloaded from EDC. Click here for module Newsletter and here for module Newsletter Popup. For more inforamtion, questions and support visit the Elxis forums.