Name:	★ Newsletter Builder
Version:	3.08 (Released: Apr 30, 2024 - changelog)
Requires:	CMS Builder v3.65
Price:	Free
Download:	Login to download

Summary:

Email newsletter software lets your customers quickly and easily publish email newsletters. This software supports creating and sending newsletters, subscribing, double opt-in confirmations, unsubscribing, importing of existing mailing lists, web archives of past newsletters, and powerful background mailer for incremental mailing for web hosts with email per hour limits.

Overview

Email newsletters are one of the most tried and true internet marketing tools available. They are proven to deliver results, and are low cost to maintain - customers and fans sign themselves up, while you just type in the message and click send.

What could be better than an opt-in marketing tool that builds on itself, collecting more subscribers every day?

For website owners, a newsletter is an absolute requirement. Whether your site is nothing more then a "Coming Soon" page or a full featured ecommerce site, a frequent newsletter is a great way to add a personal touch to your website or business. Keep in touch with your customers, reach out to new contacts, share news about your products, services, and promotions, and foster a sense of community.

For internet professionals, this add-on is an easy upsell and value proposition for any client. All they need to do is hire you to setup the plugin and subscribe forms, and their subscriber list will start building itself. They can then start sending newsletters, or if you provide writing or marketing services, you can even offer newsletter writing as an additional service.

At interactivetools, we started with an open-source newsletter mailer years ago. After simply adding a subscribe form on a number of our pages we now have well over 50,000 subscribers. Even still, the open-source tool we used required a separate login and required specialized knowledge to navigate (it was a sea of menus, links, and options). We've actually had to delay sending newsletters when the staff who knew the system were busy or away - but we have now put all that frustration to good use!

We've taken all the complicated settings out of sending a newsletter and made it as easy as using web mail. Newsletter Builder integrates smoothly with your CMS, providing a simple login and menu to perform all the website maintenance tasks. Three simple menus (messages, subscribers, and settings) let the newsletter writers do everything they need to do, and default content and settings ensures you're never starting with a blank slate.

What's more, we've built fail safe business processes into the system. You can't send a newsletter out until you've sent it to your "Test List" first, ensuring clients and sleepy internet marketers will take at least one final look before sending that typo or broken link to 50,000 customers (we learned that lesson the hard way!).

And now for some technical details - like all of our software, Newsletter Builder will run on almost any and all web hosting servers on the planet. The only extra feature you need to ask about is "cron jobs" or "scheduled tasks" so you can setup the included "background mailer" to automatically send out messages in the background. Almost every web hosts supports this, let us know if you find one that doesn't.

If your web host has restrictions on how many emails you are allowed to send per hour or day, we've got you covered. The background mailer supports throttling and incremental mailing. You can specify how many messages to send in a batch and an optional delay between messages. Again, this usually isn't required but it's there if you need it.

Next up, if you have an existing email list (or multiple lists), a simple and powerful email importer is included. Just copy and paste your subscriber list into a large textbox and Newsletter Builder will import them (while also checking for duplicates, and alerting you to any invalid emails).

And finally, an online web archive is included. The online archive shows all your past newsletters, which generates content that will keep customers (and search engines) coming back to your site.

We built this tool for ourselves, and we're very proud to offer it to you as well. It's simple to use and learn, easy to teach to customers, and it will generate revenue and create new leads. Give it a try, we promise you won't be disappointed.

And as always, if you have any questions, call, email, or post in the forum.

NOTE: We've released version 2.01 and add even more features. They are as follows:
- Open Tracking: Message Menu now displays the number of users who opened or viewed a message
- Click Tracking: Message Menu now displays the times message links were clicked and total users who clicked
- Advanced Logging: Entries are tracked for: Subscribes, Confirms, Unsubscribes, Sent Messages, Opens, and Views
- Subscriber History: Subscriber menu shows history of user actions from Log Menu
- Archive Only: New option allows you to add old newsletters or content to online archive without sending mailout
- Faster Mailing: Mailer routines have been optimized to process emails faster and minimize required disk space

NOTE: We've released version 2.03 with the following updates:
- Scheduled Send: You can now specify a future date when a newsletter will be emailed out.
- Templates: Create multiple email templates to control the look & feel of sent emails
- Log Data: Added data for: emails of unsubscribers, urls of clicked links, imported emails, test mailout emails
- Log Seaching: Added advanced log search options for: Event type, subscriber num, message num

NOTE: We've released version 3.00 with the following updates:
- Multiple Mailing Lists: Multiple mailing lists can now be created and users can choose which to subscribe to.
- Dynamic Mailing Lists: You can now create mailing lists with custom search queries or database queries.
- Subscriber Tables: You can now specify which table to use for list subscribers tableas the source of subscriber emails (such as the CMS accounts table)
- Improved Mailer: Mailing is now handled by CMS Task Scheduler. Setup under: Admin > General > Background Tasks
- Subscriber Placeholders: When available, subscriber fields can be displayed with #subscriber.fieldname# (eg: fullname)
- Message Placeholders: When available, these newsletter fields can be displayed #newsletter.num# and #newsletter.subject#
- Custom Placeholders: You can now add custom placeholders by creating a file: newsletterBuilder-custom-placeholders.php

Key Features

• Simple interface for sending newsletters - easy to learn and teach.
• Automatic test list requires customers and staff to send "preview" email to testers before mailing full list.
• Web archive of past newsletters lets customers and search engines browse content
• Generates all forms needed to: subscribe, unsubscribe, or confirm subscriptions (double opt-in)
• Includes importer - copy and paste emails to import from one or more existing lists
• Background Mailer respects web host mail limits with send throttles and limits

Customer Quotes

This is indeed a welcome plugin! It will become a true mail list-server when it incorporates the capacity for multiple mailing lists and multiple admins.

Philip Godfrey
Celestial Software