Newsletters and Mailing Lists

The newsletter tools is used to publish newsletters (mail-outs) to a list of subscribers.

Visitors can sign-up for a newsletter/list by entering their e-mail address in the subscribe form. The form can be added anywhere in your site templates using the supplied subscribe widget.

Multiple lists are supported allowing you to publish newsletters for specific sections of your site or specific customer groups.

Subscription

A person must enter their e-mail address to subscribe and join a list.

After submitting their e-mail address AssetNow NX sends a confirmation message to the address entered.

The confirmation message contains an activation link that must be clicked to complete the subscription process. This prevents others from subscribing people to unwanted newsletters and lists. If a subscription is not activated it will be deleted from the system after a week.

The activation link displays the subscription account settings:

• Change e-mail address if required.
• Newsletter format allowing subscribers to select plain text, X/HTML or multi-part (X/HTML if their e-mail program supports it, otherwise falls back to plain text).
• If multiple newsletters are available a subscriber can select others.

Newsletter Formatting

Formatting newsletters for correct display in the numerous e-mail programs available is a challenge. AssetNow NX uses separate templates for newsletter formatting as it is unlikely that your site layout templates will display correctly in e-mail programs.

If you have multiple newsletters you can apply different templates to each. Separate templates are also used for plain text and X/HTML formats.

Subscriber account and unsubscribe links can be added in templates using simple AssetNow NX directives.

The Lists tool allows you to preview the newsletters and send copies to specific e-mail addresses for testing prior to sending to subscribers.

Tracking

Links in newsletters can be tracked by enabling the tracking option. This will add a tracking code to all links and allow click tracking for the newsletter and individual subscribers. All newsletter links, inlcuding account edit, unsubscribe, and tracking links use a short format to avoid wrapping when displayed in e-mail programs. Wrapped links should be avoided where possible as they do not always work when clicked.

Bounces

If you setup a return e-mail address for undelivered messages AssetNow NX can automatically check the messages in this account and display subscribers which have multiple bounces. You can then check these e-mail addresses and delete these subscribers as required.