 According to Glen Chancy, CIO of CorFun: “Email communication is integral to community based websites.” Glen further explained that Joomla Webmasters running these websites often encounter problems with email communication. Glen says, “Webmasters often need an email to go out targeting site members in a specific state, or zip code, or with a specific set of interests. A Joomla Webmaster with Community Builder installed can easily rely on the Users List function to search for members. Since Community Builder can do simple or complex searches, getting a good list of members with certain common demographics is not hard at all. Trouble is – what do you do with those results when you have them?”
Community Builder, a user management component for the Joomla CMS, does not have robust mass email capabilities. Community Builder also does not have a method of exporting search results based on its User Lists, which are powerful query tools. These facts limit the effectiveness of Community Builder for marketing. CorFun, a leading developer for Joomla, has released Event Mail, a new product to address these issues and more. Using the Event Mail component, Webmasters can use Community Builder User Lists search results to create Acajoom mailing lists. (Acajoom is the leading email marketing component for Joomla).
Glen explains the need for Event Mail: “Community Builder is at the heart of many Joomla communities. In the Joomla space, Webmasters often aren’t technical people. They are often professionals who feel like their data is trapped and they can’t use it. Event Mail lets them get at the demographics of their site members and custom tailor targeted communications.”
Event Mail is simple to use. A Webmaster uses a Community Builder User List to create a list of users meeting specified criteria. The Webmaster can then further refine the list by using the robust search options native to Community Builder. When the Webmaster has the desired list of members, Event Mail is used to select one or more Acajoom mailing lists to add the members as subscribers. The members can then get targeted mailings.
“Community Builder is great at managing Joomla users, and the search capabilities of the User Lists function are fantastic,” Glen explained, “Acajoom is a best-of-breed mailing system. It has a free version that is great for smaller sites, and two paid versions which include such capabilities as scheduled newsletters and even auto-responders. Each application is great by itself, but they don’t really talk to each other. Businesses and non-profits have to be able to send professional emails to the right people. You don’t want to push a charity concert in Chicago to folks living in Florida!”
 For Joomla Webmasters, this capability increases the power of Joomla as a marketing platform. Henry Bentley, VP for Marketing at CorFun, explained how Event Mail has already been used in a product launch. “An advertiser on our beer community site, FreeBeerBuddy.com, was launching a new dark beer. The brewery wanted to let dark beer lovers in Florida know all about the new product. So we used Community Builder to identify all FreeBeerBuddy.com members that liked dark beer and lived in Florida. We imported that list into Acajoom to a special mailing list, and then sent them a flyer from the brewery all about the new beer. The results were incredible. Instead of an email blast, this was more like an email rifle shot aimed squarely at the most receptive audience.”
Event Mail enables Joomla Webmasters to easily provide multiple email newsletters. As Henry explained, this opens a whole different way of using Joomla for email marketing. “Event Mail is taking newsletter marketing in Joomla to a whole new level,” Henry explained, “Using Event Mail, a member can sign up  generically to receive mailings from the site, and then the Webmaster can build targeted mailings specifically aimed at members based on interests, demographics, or other information on their Community Builder profiles. A Joomla site can be a marketing powerhouse enabling you to ride out a tough economy.”
The export file used by Event Mail to create custom Acajoom mailing lists is also useful in other ways. The export file, which is a simple text file, can be downloaded directly to a desktop using FTP or another file transfer method. The export file has all the Community Builder profile fields which are displayed on the CB Registration form. This valuable data can be used to create import files for other software. Developers can also use the export file to build custom applications that mine information from Community Builder.
Event Mail also creates an integration between DT Register, the leading event registration management tool for Joomla, and Acajoom. This feature allows registered attendees of a particular event to automatically be added to an Acajoom mailing list for targeted email communication.
 This feature is very helpful for businesses, non-profits and ministries that have events with online registration. Henry Bentley of CorFun gives an example of how integration between DT Register and Acajoom helps in the real world, “CorFun had a customer doing seminars at locations around the country. Hundreds of people were signing up for each seminar online through DT Register and paying a fee to attend. Our customer wanted to send emails to all the registered attendees leading up to the event. These were PDFs of different topics, reminders of the date, that kind of thing. In the past, that would have been a problem, as DT Register didn’t have mass email capabilities. With Event Mail, this problem is solved. In Event Mail, we selected the seminars, selected the right Acajoom mailing list, and with a simple click all attendees were signed up to receive emails.”
Event Mail also integrates DT Register with Community Builder. This allows registered attendees of an event to become automatic members of the sponsoring Website.
 Glen Chancy explained how this works, “A visitor comes to your site, and signs up to attend your event. To register, visitors have given you their Names, Addresses, Organizations, Phone Numbers, and often a whole lot more. That is a lot of information. In many cases, you would like to ‘convert’ those event attendees into members of your site so that you can have even more interactions with them in the future. Event Mail makes this conversion seamless, as you select the event in DT Register, then with a click you convert all those attendees into members of your site!”
Event Mail builds Community Builder profiles for each attendee of a specified event. All of the information provided during the Event Registration process in DT Register is automatically moved to the corresponding CB Profile fields. This process eliminates cumbersome double registration.
“Event Mail really showcases our development philosophy,” said CorFun President Olan Chancy. “Joomla is a great platform, and has some great components. But those components often don’t talk to each other, and so Joomla’s effectiveness as a business tool is reduced. We are focused on bridging these systems to make the lives of Joomla users working in businesses, non-profits, and ministries easier. CorFun makes Joomla work!”
For more information about Event Mail, visit CorFun, Inc.'s online store, Corshops to view the complete list of features and benefits. CorFun is a leading eServices provider specializing in Joomla components and Joomla-powered Website design. |
