Open Source Support Desk

Plan Your Email Drop Offs

Planning the best time for an email drop off is like planning a twitter message. As stated before, you might not actually have anybody reading your tweets. You'll only get 5 minutes of fame on Twitter. Being aware of what is the best time to send out your newsletters is very similar.

Let's say you created an informative newsletter and planned on sending it out as soon as you completed it. If you live in the USA and sent the letters out at 6PM EST, your email will hit mailboxes in Europe sometime after midnight. Your European clients will wake up and rush through their morning emails and skim your well crafted newsletter, never to re-read it. This is less then ideal. You might want to hit them when they least expect it. You want them to first notice your newsletter when they have free time to read it and act on it. This is very similar to how you might time a eBay auction to end. You don't want it to close at 3am, you want it to finish up at noon on a Sunday. It's all about exposure.

Geo-targeting for Email Marketing

Mailchimp Version 5 (V5) has this feature built right in. Mailchimp is a web based application that helps you design send and track your email marketing campaigns. It offers you the ability to set your newsletters to hit your Euro or Yen subscribers at 10am even though you send it at 3pm your time.

Sending emails to your existing web site members via newsletters is an invaluable tool in your marketing belt. It's a great way to develop repeat sales, as well as keeping your target audience informed and up to speed. 

With Mailchimp you can design brilliant looking emails with zero knowledge of HTML or PHP. Simply point, click, send and you will be able to reach up to 500 subscribers and send up to 3,000 emails a month, absolutly free. With the new Mailchimp V5 release they are bringing some new technology to the table by adding Time Warp, Geo-Locate, Geo Targetting and Auto-Translate. It will help you geo-locate, geo target and translate email marketing efforts. You can find out more at their Mailchimp V5 site. One thing is for sure, Mailchimp is one of the most powerful email marketing tools available today. Best of all, it starts with a free subscription for you to test.

How To Bring Mailchimp To Joomla

Like other email newsletter service providers, Mailchimp has the option to create a subscription form for you to embed on your site. Simply point and click what fields you need (First Name, Last Name, Email Address or any other info you need for managing your subscribers), and select styling options like the background color of the subscription form. Mailchimp will generate the HTML code for you to embed in a regular Joomla Custom HTML-module. Please check our free Tutorial Video to see How to Create Content in a Custom HTML-module.

Free Plugin

CorePHP, one of our Partners, have developed a plugin that will allow your new Joomla users to automatically be added to your Mailchimp database. You can pick this plugin up in CorePHP's free downloads area and install it like any other Joomla Extensions. Please check our free Tutorial Video on How to Install an Extension in Joomla 1.5.

Now, when visitors register on your Joomla site, they will automatically be added to Mailchimp, and allow you to send out very targeted and specific emails to your users, without putting any additional stress on your website.

We want to know what you use for your email campaigns. Do you use Mailchimp? Do you use a Joomla extension? What works best for you? Feel free to leave your comment.