Smart-Newsletters
Last updated
Last updated
This article will explain you how to create a Smart-Newsletter.
The Smart-Newsletter feature is included in AcyMailing Enterprise.
An Smart-Newsletter is a Newsletter automatically sent to one or several of your lists at a fixed frequency (every day, every week, every month... you can select anything you want).
Our Smart-Newsletter system is integrated with several Joomla components so you can include in your Smart-Newsletter your newly created (or modified) Joomla articles, your newly created VirtueMart products, your upcoming events from jCalPro, jEvents, EventList, your new content for K2, your new listings from Mosets Tree...
And for each of these integrations, you will be able to specify a "Min. number of items" to allow the generation of the Newsletter so you can use our Smart-Newsletter system as a notification system too for newly created content / article / events / products...
If the result of the tag does not match your minimum number of items, the Newsletter won't be generated and won't be sent.
You can create as many Smart-Newsletters as you want and attach those Smart-Newsletters to one or several lists.
Connect to the back-end of your website and then click on the menu AcyMailing -> Smart-Newsletters
Click on the New button to create a new Smart-Newsletter
Create Auto-newsletter
Enter the subject of your Smart-Newsletter. You can add in this subject the tag {issuenb} which will be replaced by the current issue number (incremented each time a Newsletter is generated). You can also include other tags in this subject (like a list of content articles, a date, a user information...).
Set your Smart-Newsletter as published (an unpublished Smart-Newsletter won't be generated/sent).
Send HTML: Choose if you want to send the text only version of the Newsletter or the HTML Version too.
Language: You can attach your Smart-Newsletter to a specific language so the links inserted in your newsletter using tags will add the correct language parameter. This option is available when you have a multilingual site (you installed at least two languages or use JoomFish/FaLang)
Next Generate Date: Indicates the next time the Newsletter should be generated.
Generate Frequency: Specify the frequency at which your Newsletter should be generated. If you want to use the Smart-Newsletter as a notification system, you should select the option "as soon as possible" so AcyMailing will check for new content each time the cron triggers your website.
Issue Number : This is an automatic number indicating the next issue number of the Newsletter. This number will be incremented each time AcyMailing generates a Newsletter from this Smart-Newsletter.
Last Run time: This field indicates the last time the Newsletter has been generated so if you add new articles in your Smart-Newsletter, they will be added if they have been created after this date.
Generating Mode:
Wait for the confirmation before sending: In that case, AcyMailing will generate the Newsletter and send a notification. You will have to manually send or schedule the generated Newsletter in order to send it. This option is very useful in test mode. Please select this option first, we will switch to the other option "Send the generated Newsletter" later.
Send the generated Newsletter: AcyMailing will generate and send the Newsletter automatically.
Send notification to: Please specify the e-mail address where you want to receive the notification of the Newsletter creation. This is not a mandatory field.
The "Generate Frequency" allows you to choose when your smart-newsletter should generate and send a new newsletter. It has 4 possibilities:
As soon as possible: It will generate a newsletter each time your cron task is triggered (i.e: generally every 15 minutes). Of course, the goal is not to send the same newsletter every 15 minutes but use it with the tag system to send a notification each time a new content is added on your site (articles, blog posts, RSS feeds, etc...). To do this, you must set the option "Min. number of items" to "1" and "Filter" to "Only newly created" when inserting a tag in your smart-newsletter
On the 1st Monday of the month: You can choose to generate a newsletter on the 1st, 2nd, 3rd or 4th Monday-Sunday of the month, each month with this option
Every X Hours/Days/Weeks/Months: If you want to send an email each week with the new products of your site, you can use this option
Every week on Monday-Sunday: You can choose to generate the newsletter each Mondays and Wednesdays with this option, like in the above screenshot
The tags inserted in your Smart-Newsletter will have two functions:
First the tag will be used to replace the content with the latest one so you can send your new articles/events/products/content...
But the tag will also be used to allow or not the Newsletter generation. So if the tag is not replaced by at least a certain number of articles, the Newsletter won't be generated and the content will be included in the next generated Newsletter.
Click on the button Tags
You can use standard tags in your Smart-Newsletter to include personal information in the generated Newsletter but you can also include content with some specific rules.
The plugin used to insert your Joomla articles is the AcyMailing: Joomla Content Plugin
Click on the menu Joomla Content
Click on the tab Categories
Auto Content
Configure the tag the way you want and then click on the button Insert the tag
The same way, you will be able to include your newly created Products, K2 content, Mosets Listings, upcoming events from jCalPRO 2, EventList, jEvents...
At any time you want, you can click on the button "Generate". AcyMailing won't force the Newsletter generation (it will do it only if it was time to do it) but will tell you - for each Smart-Newsletter - when it will be generated and why it won't be generated if it was time to do it.
test auto-newsletter
If AcyMailing generated a Newsletter from this Smart-Newsletter, you will be able to see it as a scheduled Newsletter in the listing of standard Newsletters.
You don't have to click on the button "Generate". It's something AcyMailing will do automatically with the cron task so you should do it only if you are wondering what's going on.
It requires two triggers from the cron task to generate and send your Newsletter automatically. The first time the cron task triggers your website will generate your Newsletter as a scheduled Newsletter and then the second time it will take care of adding all e-mails in the queue and will start the send process.
The automatic process requires a cron task. Please make sure you configured a cron task on our server or on your own server and test your cron task to make sure it's working properly.
First, make sure your Smart-Newsletter is attached to at least one published list and that this list contains at least one subscriber!
But this case is a normal behaviour if you selected the option Generating Mode: Wait for the confirmation before sending so you should edit your Smart-Newsletter and make sure you selected the option Generating Mode: Send the generated Newsletter
Smart-Newsletter testing mode
First of all, you should make sure your cron task is configured properly and running.
AcyMailing won't send the Newsletter immediately. AcyMailing needs to be triggered twice by the cron task:
The first time AcyMailing will generate the Newsletter
The second time AcyMailing will send the generated Newsletter
So if you have a cron frequency of 15 minutes, AcyMailing will send your Newsletter from 15 to 30 minutes after the article creation (if your Smart-Newsletter frequency is 0)
You can add several tags with different categories (or even the same categories). If you do that, the Newsletter will be only generated if each tags meets its minimum number of articles. So if you have two content tags with a minimum set for both but one of them has no new article, then the Newsletter won't be generated. Of course, you can set the minimum to 0 so it won't block the generation.
Yes, you can! That's very useful if you use the Smart-Newsletter as a notification system so you can even add the article title in your Newsletter subject. Simply copy/paste the tag you want to use in your Smart-Newsletter subject and it will do the job.
