Automatic campaigns
Automatic campaigns can generate and send new campaigns on a regular basis (Enterprise version only).
This feature is mainly used to send send an email each time a new article is published on the site, or to send a monthly email containing the 3 last products of your e-commerce solution.
Create an automatic campaign
First of all, create an ordinary campaign, then select the "Automatic" option in its Send settings tab.
Here are the additional settings:
Type of trigger: this option allows you to choose the type of trigger you want for this campaign. For example, you can trigger it every day at 10 am, each time AcyMailing is triggered via the cron...
Start date: if this option is set, your campaign won't generate campaign until this date
Track campaign: if this option is set it won't track the open and click stat on every campaign generated
Ask for confirmation: If you activate this option, the generated campaigns won't be sent so you'll have to confirm them manually (useful when testing the auto campaign feature when you're unsure):
The generated emails can be found in the campaigns listing under the "Generated" filter. The ones you have to confirm are labeled "Waiting for confirmation" and the name (not the subject) of each generated email will be suffixed with the "#email number".
The "Send" button will confirm this email, it will be added to the queue. You can access the automatic campaign that generated this email from the link at the top of the page.
Send a different content for each email
Ok you know how to setup a campaign sent each month, it would be nice to have a different content in each mail instead of sending over and over the same one.
In this example, we'll setup an automatic campaign that sends the 3 last articles of your site (Joomla in this screenshot, but it's the same for WordPress) each month.
First, insert articles by category in your email:
Select or not some categories and the way you want the articles to be displayed, then here's the important step:
When an email is generated, you want to insert the 3 last articles, so "Max. number of elements" must be set to "3", and the articles inserted in your email are ordered by latest published (you can keep the default "ID" value, it's the same result).
Don't send twice the same content
Right, an email is sent each month with the 3 last articles of your site, but what happens if no article has been published during a month?
The first option makes sure that the same article isn't sent twice. If there are only two new articles since the last email was sent, only those two will be inserted in the next email.
The "Min. number of elements" option is really special, if no new article has been published on your site, no email will be sent and AcyMailing will wait for the next month (instead of sending an empty email).
This is independant from other content you could insert in your email, if the min. number of elements isn't reached, the email won't be generated no matter if you insert an other dynamic content in the same automatic campaign.
You can do this with pretty much any dynamic content you can insert in your emails, thanks to the add-ons.
Examples
Send an email each time a new content is published
To send an email each time a new WooCommerce / VirtueMart product is published on your site:
Create an automatic campaign sent "Each time AcyMailing is triggered"
Insert a product by category with these options:
Max. number of elements: 1
Order by: ID/publishing date/creation date, descending
Only newly created: Yes
Min. number of elements: 1
Send an email 3 days before an event starts
You may need to tell your users when an event is about to start, in JEvents or Event Booking for example:
Create an automatic campaign sent "Every day at 10:00"
Insert an event by category with these options:
Max. number of elements: 1
Order by: starting date, ascending
Only newly created: Yes/No, doesn't matter
Min. number of elements: 1
From: 3 days after
To: 4 days after
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