The Automated Newsletter plugin automatically generates and sends newsletters created from the latest articles posted.
Automated creation of newsletters can be planned daily, weekly or monthly in a great variety of ways.
Blog contents can be filtered by category, post type and an infinite number of channels can be created letting subscribers to choose among your great information stream offer.
Automated the natural evolution and replacement of Feed by Mail extension.
Setting up a channel
A channel is a set of configurations which describe how Automated should extract posts, compose a newsletter (using a theme) and send it over a time plan to targeted subscribers.
Subscribers are targeted using a list which is bonded to that channel: subscribers, on their profile, can activate a list and start to receive the periodic newsletter. More on this topic below since there are different marketing strategies that can be used.
Planning
Planning is weekly or monthly. On weekly schedules, the days of the week can be selected. You can setup a single Monday issue or double week issues, for example on Monday and Thursday. You can eventually offer a channel with a weekly summary and another one with a daily summary (selecting every day in the week).
Monthly scheduling is based on days of week: first Monday, second Monday and so on. There is a reason: sending an email on first day of a month means to send it one time on Monday, another time on Sunday, another one on Thursday. This is not usually a good idea.
Posts to extract
Posts can be extracted without filters or selecting one or more categories.
There is not a correspondence between your blog categories and Automated channels. Since usually readers don’t care too much about your internal category organization, is up to you to create channels with one or more categories that can be of interest to your subscribers.
Post are extracted applying those filter and starting from the date of the last newsletter, so the posts which are added are always unread posts (anyway a theme can add a list of “old posts” in the lower part of the newsletter).
Themes and previews
In the theme panel, a theme can be chosen and once saved its options panel is loaded. The theme is able to show the extracted posts, offering few options to control the layout or other kind of content (header, footer and so on).
Two previews are available:
- the theme preview is built extracting few posts and composing a generic newsletter: it helps to get an overview of how the theme looks.
- the newsletter preview is the real newsletter that would be sent if generated in that moment. This preview can be empty if there is nothing to send to subscribers (no new content from the last delivery).
Last delivery date
The last delivery date is used to extract fresh posts (and to check if there are fresh posts). This date can be changed on the status panel. Usually there is no need to modify it but there are few cases (usually server crashes) where it could be a smart choice to move back that date to regenerate the newsletter. Just a dramatic example.
The status panel shows even the new posts which will be part of the newsletter.
Generated newsletters and statistics
The tab “Newsletters” lists all the generated newsletter for that channel, their status (sent, sending) and gives action buttons to delete the newsletter or access the statistics.
Subscription to channels
As said, every channel is connected to a list, so you can think of a list as an option for the subscriber which wants to receive updates. Upon regular subscription you can offer the subscriber one or more lists he can decide to opt-in, or you can automatically opt-in one or more lists forcing those lists to the new subscribers (see the subscription configuration panel).
Promoting a single channel
With the new short codes you can even create a specific form for subscription to a specific list. So you create a landing page with that form:
Just remember that an already subscribed email address is correctly managed by Newsletter: the subscriber experiences a regular subscription but the collected data is merged with the old one.
Promoting your brand new channel to old subscribers
If you setup a brand new channel and you want to promote it to your old subscribers, the best way is to make the associated list available as public (at least on subscriber’s profile – see the lists panel) and send a newsletter inviting people to activate that option. Or, to be more aggressive, you can associate every subscriber to you channel list and then send a newsletter to inform about your new free service (with the option to disable it modifying the profile). It’s up to you!
