Newsletters - Our-Hometown

Promotional Newsletter Inserts with MemberPress

Christopher Winders — Fri, 03 Nov 2023 14:30:16 +0000

MemberPress Coupon Codes

Before setting up a Promotional Newsletter Insert, we need to create a Coupon Code to be shared with the newsletter recipients for use when purchasing a subscription on your website.

From your WordPress Dashboard, navigate to Memberpress then Coupons.

This will take you to the listing of any coupons already present including columns showing the discount, discount mode, start and end dates, etc. To create a new coupon click the Add New Button.

By default, the new coupon code will be a randomly generated string of numbers and letters, but you can edit the code to whatever you want — just don’t include any spaces or special characters. Most customers prefer to use something easy for their readers to remember. This is the code that you will eventually deliver to your readers via email newsletters, social media, print, or however you choose to advertise your promotional discount.

In this example the customer is offering 15% off the first payment for monthly memberships and the first month free for annual memberships.

Under the Coupon Options, there are a few settings that need to be configured to determine how your coupon should work.

Discount: You can enter either a dollar amount or a percentage to be discounted when using the standard mode as described below. The discount for the other modes is specified below the mode selection menu.

Discount Mode: There are three discount modes:

Standard – A standard discount of the amount/percentage entered above. If applied to a recurring subscription, this discount will apply to each payment made towards that subscription.
First Payment Only – Discounts the amount/percentage entered below, but only on the First Payment of a recurring, auto-renewing membership.
Trial Period Override – Discounts the amount/percentage entered below, but only on the Trial Period of a recurring, auto-renewing membership. (Note the membership does not need to have a trial period in order for this to work. The benefit of using this setting over the First Payment Only option is that you can set the amount of days that the trial period should last, whereas the first payment can only be for the normal duration of the automatically recurring subscription.)

Usage Count: You can enter a maximum number of uses if you want to limit this offer to the first “X” amount of people to use the code, or if you have a code that you only want to give to one specific customer.

You can allow customers to use the coupon code on Subscription Upgrades or Downgrades by ticking that checkbox.

If you wish you can specify a start date for the coupon by ticking the Schedule Coupon Start checkbox and entering the desired date.

You can similarly schedule a coupon to Expire on a selected date at midnight after which it will no longer be valid.

Finally, Select Which Memberships to Apply the Coupon to.

Create a Promotional Insert

With a Coupon Code created, let’s move on to setting up the Promotional Newsletter Insert.

Navigate to Memberpress then Promotional Newsletter Inserts. This will take you to the listing of all your promotions with columns indicating placement, frequency, start and end dates, recipients and which discount coupon is being used. To create a new insert click the Add New Button.

Enter the title of your Insert, and edit your promotional message as desired in the textbox — just be sure NOT TO DELETE the “promo-coupon” text placeholder, as that serves as the variable where the coupon code you select later will display.

The insert message can contain any number of elements such as photos or graphics in addition to the text. Also note in this instance that the publisher is including TWO codes and as such is not using the coupon placeholder instead placing them manually.

Once your message is complete, scroll down to the Promotion Options beneath the main textbox.

Here you can choose the placement of your Insert in relation to your regular newsletter: Above or Below. Above would display the promo at the top of the newsletter, while Below would display it at the bottom of the message.

Next, select the Frequency. The Frequency determines how often the promo should be included in your newsletters: Send with each newsletter, Weekly, Monthly, Quarterly, or Annually.

If you choose Send with each newsletter, every newsletter will include the insert until the promotion ends. If you choose Weekly, the insert will be included with the newsletter once per week until the promotion ends, and so on.

Next, you can enter a Start Date and End Date, which will determine the period that the system will attach the Insert to outgoing Newsletters. This allows you to schedule promotions in advance, in case you had one promotion planned for summer and another one for the fall.

You will need to specify which groups of members the promotion should apply to: Non-Paying Newsletter Subscribers, Expired MemberPress Subscribers, or Both.

The differences here are important. A non-paying newsletter subscriber could just be any visitor who has subscribed to your newsletter, while expired MemberPress Subscribers are former subscribers whose subscriptions have expired and were not renewed.

If you were running a campaign aimed only at past subscribers, you wouldn’t want to include non-paying newsletter subscribers. However, a generic promotion aimed at any non-subscribers would make sense to be delivered to both groups.

Finally select the Coupon Code that should be included with this promotion. The dropdown list will contain all the coupons created in MemberPress, so choose the appropriate one for the new insert.

Once you are satisfied with the insert click the Publish button to finish creating your insert. Note also that the Publish panel has similar status and visibility options as articles, if the need arises.

When your Promotional Insert is Published, it will begin attaching itself to e-mails automatically on the Start Date you’ve entered.

The post Promotional Newsletter Inserts with MemberPress first appeared on Our-Hometown.

Custom Post Types in your Newsletter

Our-Hometown Staff — Tue, 21 Jul 2020 00:27:55 +0000

The Newsletter Plugin included with Our-Hometown’s WordPress Publishing Platform is a powerful tool for e-mail marketing, customer outreach, and simply sharing your newest and most interesting articles with your readers. But did you know you that you can include more than just Articles in your stylish newsletters?

The Extended Composer Blocks update that was released last year includes a useful “block” named the Custom Post Type (CPT) Block. This block let’s you select any of the custom post types in use on your website and include them in your newsletter, with the same familiar settings would see when including standard Articles. You can make your e-mail marketing more effective with dynamic content that goes beyond just your latest articles!

Create a list of upcoming events using the “Events” custom post type!

So, what is a Custom Post Type?

A Custom Post Type is the technical term used to refer to the different types of information saved in your website’s back end. Articles are the default, standard “Post Type” that you’re already familiar with, but other post types include Places (entries in your Business Directory), Events (entries in your Events calendar), MaxGalleria Galleries (photo galleries created within MaxGalleria), Real Estate (Real Estate listings, if your site uses them), and more!

The popular GeoDirectory plugin that is included with our Reader Resources is used for the majority of these Custom Post Types. If you’re using GeoDirectory to manage a catalog of information, that information will be saved as a Custom Post Type and can be included in your newsletter.

Let’s look at the settings!

If you’re including Articles in your custom newsletters already, you’ve probably used the CPT Block to achieve this. However, if you click the Post Type drop-down, you’ll see many more options available in addition to Articles.

The other settings are largely the same: you can choose whether you want to include photos, excerpts & authors, and choose how many of this post type should be listed. Some formatting options exist that allow you change the size of the title text and body text, as well as customize the “Read More” button. Most importantly, you’ll need to choose which “Category” to include posts from. These categories will change based on which post type is selected.

Once you’ve configured your CPT Block‘s settings, simply click apply and watch the changes go into effect.

Keep in mind that not all post types make sense to include in a Newsletter. For example, “Memberships”, “Groups” and “EditionAction” are post types used internally by the system for subscription management purposes. These post types would serve little purpose in a newsletter. We recommend sticking to things like Articles, Events, Places, and other GeoDirectory Custom Post Tyes.

If you find that you don’t have the Custom Post Type Block enabled on your Newsletter, please reach out to us at ops@our-hometown.com and we’ll enable it for you right away!

The post Custom Post Types in your Newsletter first appeared on Our-Hometown.

Custom Newsletters with Drag & Drop Composer

Our-Hometown Staff — Wed, 18 Sep 2019 23:35:01 +0000

You can use the Newsletter plugin’s built in Drag & Drop Composer to create high quality custom newsletters in just a matter of minutes!

While these newsletters cannot pull recently published Articles, they are useful for communicating important information to your subscribers, e-mail marketing, and more.

1. Navigate to the Newsletter Plugin

Start by navigating to the Newsletter tab on your Dashboard.

2. Create Your Newsletter

From the Newsletter Dashboard, click “New” to create a new newsletter.

3. Choose Your Theme

From the list of themes to choose from, select the Drag & Drop Composer.

4. Construct your Newsletter

Once the Newsletter Editor has loaded, you’ll see a few items have been pre-selected and added to your template. This includes a “Pre Header”, a “Header”, a “Hero”, a “Legal Text” area, and a “Footer” area.

Each area is distinguishable when you hover over them, as options appear allowing you edit or delete them. Of course, you can also re-arrange them by click and dragging them.

While it is entirely your own preference, we recommend deleting the “Header” area and replacing it with a simple “Image”, which you can set to your publications logo.

5. Edit each widget to your preference.

We created the e-mail below using just the following options: Pre-Header, Image, Heading, Text, Call to Action, Legal Text, and Footer.

You can use a combination of any of the available options on the left side to create great newsletters for nearly any purpose!

The post Custom Newsletters with Drag & Drop Composer first appeared on Our-Hometown.

Newsletter Leads Extension (Pop Up Newsletter Box)

Our-Hometown Staff — Fri, 02 Nov 2018 04:35:30 +0000

With Leads Extension for The Newsletter Plugin you can add a popup modal box to your website with a couple of clicks and offer your visitors a simple way to subscribe to your newsletters. You can also setup a fixed subscription bar at the bottom or at the top of the screen with the same purpose.

You will find Leads under the “List Building” menu inside Newsletter. As you may notice, we completely re-designed the panels layout, to improve user-friendliness and readability. These changes will be gradually applied to all other extensions. All the options inside Leads option panel are grouped by their functions.

Popup Options

Status lets you globally enable Popup module in your website.

Visibility panel lets you specify when and how often you’d like your popup to be shown.

Show on x page view This means that your popup will be shown when somebody visits your page for the x time.
Show after 2 seconds How many seconds should pass before your popup comes up.
Restart counting after x days How many days should pass before the popup is shown again to a single user.

Visual options panel lets you customize your popup feel & look.

Aspect ratio – Use these values to specify width and height of your popup box. Please note that the popup won’t stretch automatically when new elements are added, so you always should check the size manually when changes are made.
Title – Here you can insert the main title of your popup.
Pre Form Text – Here you can insert a small paragraph that can act as a subtitle.
Post Form Text – Here you can insert a small paragraph that will be shown after the form.
Show the name field – Select this option if you want to collect also your subcribers’ names.
Button Label – Here you can specify the text that will be shown on the subscribe button.
Color Palette – We provided some fancy color schemes you can use to add some stylish touch to your popup box. The color on the left will be applied to the background, while the color on the right will be applied to the button. Feel free to try them all!

Note: Leads for Newsletter already uses double-opt: you can check if it’s enabled in Newsletter > List Building > Subscription > General panel.

Fixed Bar Options

Status lets you globally enable or disable the fixed bar on your website frontend.

Position panel lets you place the fixed bar on the top or at the bottom of your page.

Visual options panel lets you specify some visual options for your fixed bar:

Button label – Here you can specify the text that will be shown on the subscribe button.
Email field placeholder – Here you can specify the placeholder text that will be shown in the email field until the user writes something.
Color Palette – We provided some fancy color schemes you can use to add some stylish touch to your popup box. The color on the left will be applied to the background, while the color on the right will be applied to the button. Feel free to try them all!

Source & Documentation: https://www.thenewsletterplugin.com/documentation/leads-extension

The post Newsletter Leads Extension (Pop Up Newsletter Box) first appeared on Our-Hometown.

Newsletter Ads

Our Hometown, Inc. — Fri, 04 May 2018 13:51:44 +0000

Email providers don’t generally allow scripts of any sort to run in emails for security reasons.

Because of this, placing ads in emails is really just adding an image and a link. If you’d like to track the link for statistics, you can use Google UTM codes or follow the instructions found here to track via AdRotate.

Outside of statistics, you’ll just need to add your media image file to the newsletter template and add a link to it to whatever URL the advertiser wants you to direct it to.

The post Newsletter Ads first appeared on Our-Hometown.

AdRotate Tracking For Newsletter Ads

Our Hometown, Inc. — Wed, 06 Dec 2017 18:17:44 +0000

To track clicks on ads in newsletters, you can setup ads via AdRotate, alter & update the code for use in an email.

First, create your ad as you normally would.

Copy the code you see in the “AdCode” box & paste it into a text document so you can make some adjustments to it for use in the newsletter.

Replace %asset% part of the AdCode with the full image link – can usually below in the “Banner Asset” link box, or you can select it from the image information in the media libary.

Using the newspaper’s domain plus this code will redirect the ad to the correct URL for the ad as setup under AdRotate.

On the URL that the image links to (found where href=” “) between the 2 quotes, add “/adrotate/click/(replace with Image ID)/(replace w/ group ID or 0)”

The image ad ID is the number found next to it on the left on the full list of ads.

The group ID is the number on the left of the list of groups.

Take your updated copy and copy into the newsletter to display your ad. Your stats will be tracked in AdRotate.

The post AdRotate Tracking For Newsletter Ads first appeared on Our-Hometown.

Importing Newsletter Subscribers

Our Hometown, Inc. — Mon, 13 Nov 2017 15:32:10 +0000

IMPORTANT NOTE: As of January 2020, Our Hometown customers will be restricted from importing their own mailing lists. This is a necessary precaution to prevent a customer from importing a bad list of faulty e-mails, which could result in the termination of our e-mail service. To import your list of subscribers, you MUST email the list in a .csv file to ops@our-hometown.com and request that we import it for you!

The post Importing Newsletter Subscribers first appeared on Our-Hometown.

Breaking News Newsletter

Our Hometown, Inc. — Wed, 20 Sep 2017 12:37:15 +0000

The easiest way to send a breaking news newsletter is to send a “single newsletter”, and to either have a breaking news category that you will choose to include or to add a “breaking news” tag in the article tag box to your story.

Then, when you send a single newsletter, choose a template that utilizes content type, select “articles”, select the category which the story is a part of, and add the tag that you used on it to the tag filter box, to single it out for inclusion in the newsletter.

Set the “max posts” to 1 unless you have more than one breaking news story.

Hit “next” so you can customize the newsletter if you want to. Make sure to set your subject line and remove or change the default text that comes with the newsletter.

Hit “next”, select the list you want to send breaking news to, or if no lists exist, it will send it to your entire subscriber database.

When you’re ready to send, you can hit “send” or you can send a “test” email. If you are sending a test email, make sure you or another person are set as “test subscriber” in your newsletter subscriber profile (found under subscribers) so that you receive the test version of your newsletter.

When you are ready to send, hit “send” and the newsletter will begin sending out to your subscribers.

The post Breaking News Newsletter first appeared on Our-Hometown.

Newsletter Themes

Our Hometown, Inc. — Tue, 19 Sep 2017 21:04:31 +0000

When using the Our Hometown system with Newsletters, make sure you choose a theme that let’s you choose the content type to include. Our Hometown uses “articles”, instead of posts, to better address the needs of newspapers and other publications, that require subheadings, bylines, and edition dates.

When sending a newsletter, you’ll want to select “articles” as the content type, and possibly “PDF” if you want to include your e-edition as well.

A theme is something that make graphically pleasant your message and can enrich it with some extra content or even create the whole content for you (which you can just slightly modify).

On creating a new message, you select a theme: there is a blank theme which gives you a blank sheet where to compose and other themes which prefill the message with latest post from your blog.

A theme can have some configurations, like messages, colors and so on. When you change the theme its configuration appears and you can tweak the setting to see how your message will be.

Since theme settings can be complex, they will be saved and reloaded when you will compose a new message with that theme.

A theme produces two messages: one in html format, with color, fonts and images and one in pure text. Almost every email client, today, is able to show html emails, but a textual version even minimal, is useful to reduce the spam issues.

It’s not possible to produce a textual version directly from the html one, so you should write it by hand or use the content generated by a theme.

To test the theme generated email, you can send a test sample to all “test” subscribers (a test subscriber is a regular subscriber with the test flag on – see the subscriber management panel).

After you finished to configure the theme, you can select the “compose” button: a real email message is generated and you’ll enter the editing panel.

Themes cannot be changed once the email is generated: if you change your mind, you should delete the email and create a new one.

The post Newsletter Themes first appeared on Our-Hometown.

Automated Newsletters

Our Hometown, Inc. — Tue, 19 Sep 2017 21:00:39 +0000

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:




Your best email

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!

The post Automated Newsletters first appeared on Our-Hometown.