Newsletters

When you acquire a new customer, it makes great sense to keep them interested in your offerings so that they will return again to make a purchase from your online store. The Cost of Acquisition for a sale is far less with a repeat transaction.

Magento 2 is able to help you keep your brand in front of your customers with basic email newsletter tools. With these tools you can:

Allow customers to subscribe
Create newsletter templates
Schedule the sending of your newsletter
Manage your subscribers

Tip

Magento will be the first to admit that their newsletter tools are pretty basic. If you want to be more sophisticated in how you construct your newsletters, segment your customers, and more, you should consider a more robust third-party tool. We use MailChimp (http://www.mailchimp.com), a leading email system that makes it easy to manage campaigns. It's fun to use, as well.

For connecting your Magento 2 store to MailChimp, we recommend the MageMonkey for Magento 2 extension (http://store.ebizmarts.com/magemonkey-magento2.html). Ebizmarts, the creator of this extension, worked closely with MailChimp. The extension also adds emails for abandoned carts, supports multiple MailChimp lists, and creates autoresponders — emails for customer birthdays, related products, and product reviews. And, best of all, at the time of this writing, the extension was offered for free!

Subscribing customers

The newsletter function is enabled by default in Magento 2. As long as you have a newsletter subscription form on your site, your customers can subscribe and be added to your newsletter list.

Settings for newsletters are configured under Stores | Configuration | Customers in the Magento 2 backend.

By default, a subscription form is placed in the footer of the base theme. If you use a third-party theme, the subscription form may be placed in another location.

Creating newsletter templates

Before you can send a newsletter, you have to create a newsletter template. The template contains your marketing message but can also contain dynamic content.

To begin, go to Marketing | Newsletter templates in your Magento backend. Click on Add New Template. On the Template Information panel, you will see the following fields:

Template Name: Enter a name for the newsletter that is meaningful to you, as shown in your list of templates. You might use something like Marketing Newsletter, Feb 2016 or Spring Sale Announcement, 2016.
Template Subject: This is the subject that will appear in the email subject received by your customers. Use something that is both enticing without sounding spammy.
Sender Name: The From email shown in the email header will contain a name and an email address, something like: Acme Support <support@acmefurniture.com>. This field is the name part (for example, Acme Support).
Sender Email: This is the email address part of the From address. It is also the email address to which replies to your newsletter will be sent.
Note
Some people use noreply@ as a sending email address. Some spam filters will object to this, and if you're intent on customer service, this is considered poor form.
Template Content: As with other complex text fields in Magento, this one has a WYSIWYG editor to give you several tools for building an attractive and meaningful email newsletter. As with the blocks and CMS pages we discussed in Chapter 5, Managing Non-Product Content, you can insert variables and widgets, as well. This gives you the ability to insert products, category links, and more!
Tip
When creating a new template, you'll see default content for inserting a variable for an unsubscribe link. This is key if you want to avoid violating anti-spam standards. However, there are more guidelines you should follow if you want your newsletters to be considered valid emails to subscribed customers. A good resource for compliance guidance can be found at http://kb.mailchimp.com/accounts#Compliance_Tips.
Template Styles: If you wish to add CSS styles to your newsletter content, you can add the CSS styling in this field.

The fields mentioned above can be visualized in the following screenshot:

Once you've completed your template, you can click on Preview Template to view your newsletter as it will appear to your customers.

Scheduling your newsletter

When you're ready to schedule your newsletter to be sent, go to Marketing | Newsletter Templates. In the Action column to the right of the newsletter you wish to send, select Queue Newsletter in the dropdown menu. The screen will redirect to the Queue Information panel.

Here, you can select the date on which you wish to send your newsletter, select the store views for whose subscribers you wish to receive your newsletter, and review the contents of your newsletter.

Once you have made your selection, click on Save Newsletter to add it to the internal queue. Magento will send your newsletters to your chosen subscribers on the date you have selected.

To view your newsletter queue and the status of your queued newsletters, go to Marketing | Newsletter Queue.

Note

As of writing this, there is no means of cancelling a queued newsletter. You can, however, set the Queue Date Start to blank, which will prevent it from being sent.

Checking for problems

Once your newsletter is sent, you can see how well it is sent — and check for any problems — by going to Reports | Newsletter Problems Report. If any problems are found, a report identifying each error will appear in this list.

Managing your subscribers

Under Marketing | Newsletter Subscribers, you can view all or a filtered sub-set of your newsletter subscribers. This can be helpful if you wish to see how many have come from various stores in your installation. You can also unsubscribe customers from this screen.

As with most other grid listings in Magento, you can export your subscriber list to use for other purposes.

Table of Contents for Magento 2 - Build World-Class online stores

Newsletters

Tip

Subscribing customers

Creating newsletter templates

Note

Tip

Scheduling your newsletter

Note

Checking for problems

Managing your subscribers

Table of Contents for
Magento 2 - Build World-Class online stores