Sending email newsletters to folks on your website email list is one of the best ways to keep your community up to date on your latest events. The goal of every newsletter should be a call to action such as clicking on a READ MORE button that goes to a web page with more information. One option for sending newsletters is to use an email sending service like Mail Chimp. However, there are several drawbacks to using these third party services. Some are free initially but can cost a lot as the number of emails sent grows. Even if you can afford the cost, the real drawback is that you are giving your customers data to a third party service. It is much more secure to use a free Joomla email tool and send the emails directly from your own website.
In addition, third party services use shared IP addresses – meaning you may be sharing the same IP with a thousand other websites sending out newsletter – which can result in your emails going to spam folders. However, if you use a VPS with your own dedicated IP address, your emails are less likely to wind up in spam folders because your IP address is more likely to be considered “clean”.
We will therefore learn how to use a free Joomla newsletter tool called BwPostman. There is an instruction manual available for free download from this website. https://www.boldt-webservice.de/index.php/en/joomla-extensions/bwpostman.html
However, this manual is 90 pages long. We will therefore try to provide a shorter summary here.
Here is a summary of the features of BW Postman
#1 You can use either a normal Joomla article for your newsletter (so you can post the article on your website as well as sending it as a newsletter) or make a custom newsletter that is not a Joomla article.
#2 Newsletters can be personalized with the user’s name.
#3 You can create as many mailing lists or groups of email recipients or subscribers as you want.
#4 Newsletters are generated in both HTML and Text formats. This means you can create and use your own custom email HTML templates. In addition, BW Postman comes with default templates and a very easy template creation system.
#5 You can import or export subscribers from a CSV or XML file or any email address book.
#6 You can archive subscribers, newsletters, mailing lists, campaigns and templates and restore or copy them from the archive.
#7 You can include attachments with your emails.
#8 You can set how many emails will be sent at once.
#9 There is a fully functioning newsletter subscription module as well as a module for monthly overview of newsletters. All styles can be over ridden with custom CSS styles.
#10 Webmaster or another person may be informed per mail at each confirmation or unsubscription.
#11 Comes with free captcha tool to reduce subscriptions by robots with a simple math task or as user defined question, adjustable in settings. So there is no need to use a Google captcha (which would data mine your site and your members).
