New Tracking and Management Features for the Mailout Module
2008-08-09: This is a high level brief and draft only.
- Overview
- Primary Features
- Secondary Features
- Approach to Development
- Timeframe
Overview
The existing mailout management module (included as a core CMS function) provides a robust platform for managing dynamic subscriber lists as well as preparing and sending HTML and text email messages to these lists. This proposal outlines new features that we plan to add to the mailout module as standard features in all future versions of cm3.
There are three main goals for this development:
- Improved mailout logging and reporting (e.g. clicks and delivery reports)
- Improved management of email subscribers (e.g. more powerful searching, bounce management, and list cleaning)
- Better integration with the CMS user management system
Primary Features
We believe that the following minimum set of features are required for the first release of the new mailout module.
- Log and report how many users opened each email.
- Track and report on clicks on all links in an email. Tracking of links will be recorded against a particular mailout aswell as a particular "campaign" ID, to allow for tracking the same links across multiple mailouts (e.g. to different customer segments).
- Receive email bounce messages and assist with list cleaning:
- Automatically disable email addresses with permanent bounce errors
- Log and report temporary bounce messages and auto-responders (e.g. "temporary failure" or "out of office") against each mailout
- A simpler way to add an "unsubscribe" link to each email. (This is currently possible but requires a small amount of custom scripting to be written into each email.)
- Ability to filter an email list according to data in the subscription record, e.g. send email only to subscribers to a particular list who live in a certain state, prefer a certain colour, etc.
- Full view of the connection between a CMS user account and a CMS email subscriber that share the same email address
- Ability to see "related" subscriber accounts from the user account system, e.g. subscribers that share an identical first name and surname to a subscriber account but have a different email address.
- Simpler way to create a "web version" of an email newsletter.
- More coming...?
Secondary Features
The following "nice to have" features are likely to be developed after the first release of the new mailout system. However if an adequate development budget can be raised it may be possible to include them in the first release.
- Manually choose which links to track. (This might be an unnecessary feature.)
- More coming...?
Approach to Development
This project is too extensive for DDSN to fund completely with internal development resources. We plan to engage the support of existing cm3 customers. A proposal will be generated for the user group to share the cost of development of this project. DDSN will invest our own resources in the project too, of course.
Timeframe
We would like this system to be delivered in the fourth quarter of 2008. This will depend entirely on how much investment can be offered by the cm3 user community.
Date: 2008-09-09
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