Closing this forum if...

[Martin]

Frustratingly this forum was opened in response to a couple of users requesting it but nobody has actually posted anything so, if the situation doesn't change in the next 14 days I'm going to be deleting it and reducing the clutter.

If you want to use this forum and that of the related Knowledge Base then please start doing so now, rather than letting it sit, like Nelly-No-Mates, empty and unloved.

[Tony Barnes]

We use EM but thankfully it never does anything wrong - maybe we're no using it right, eh?

[CharlieFoxtrot]

I use Icontact.

(LOL@Tony)

[Brandeline]

I was interested in maybe buying a copy of EM. So my question is, to those of you already using it, is it worth the money? Does it have any significant bugs? How good is the integration with the shopping cart?

[Tony Barnes]

Cart integration isn't great - it will subscribe people to newsletter, and add people to a customer bought list, but there is no detailed burrying around into emailing specific people, who bought certain things, or spent a certain amount, etc. So you end up with pretty basic lists from ISC.

Easy to build other lists, and surveys are ok.

Actually sending, CRON stuff, etc, all seems to work fine. Also easy enough to put in custom data, though again, we don't really stretch the system - just add a name.

I think that they are pretty much ready to discontinue it though, given they now recommend mailchimp integration - I may be wrong, just seems that way.

[Brandeline]

Thanks for the info. I had one other question: when you're actually writing your newsletter or email, do you have to use a pre-made template, or can you use the same editor one would use in the cart to make it pretty and layout and create your links? (I was thinking of links/images to products in the store, for example.) Would be nice not to have to *dig* around to get the links/images to products into the email or manually cut and paste.

I wonder if they are getting some sort of kickback from the mail-chimp people. Seems odd they would give up that $500 fee on their own marketer software. Honestly, I think the ability to write basic emails from the cart really SHOULD have been integrated into the cart anyway. My old cheap $300 software I bought in 2003 that was a billion times more reliable had this basic ability, so when I pay $1800 for new stuff, I'd expect to be able to send basic emails anyway. One very big hole in the features.

[Tony Barnes]

You can use the WYSIWYG editor to do what you please, personally I always upload an HTML file and add in the field like name, unsubscribe, weblink, etc. With regards to adding product links in - nope!! You would have thought that it would, but unfortunately not. So you have to go to product, copy url, etc.

Also as a note you need to make sure your host is ok with bulk emailing, we had to ditch one set up because they lied pre-sales to us...

[Brandeline]

Took me a while, but I finally did spring for a copy of Email Marketer. Mostly, I really like it. All the juicy information about how many people opened the email, and who clicked the links is a marketers heaven. Also love the email throttling so your emails don't come in to the ISP's in a rush and make them automatically think your email is spam.

However there is one feature I haven't been able to get to work in 6.1.0, and that is the forward to a friend link. When I insert one of those, and send it to myself (a contact list of just me) if I click 'view the email in a browser' and then click the forward to a friend link it works fine, but if I click it from the email client I received it with, (Thunderbird) I get an error message back saying the forward to a friend link is invalid.

Any ideas how to fix it?

Brandeline

[Tony Barnes]

Sorry, no, never actually used that feature for some reason - maybe worth dropping a ticket in?

[Brandeline]

I looked on the Interspire Forum earlier today and found some reference to the forward to a friend thing not working in the last previous version (the post was from October 2010), along with a patch for it, but the 6.1.0 code is not quite the same through there and I'm not sure why they changed it, so I opted not to replace the current code with the patch.

So I did put in a ticket. Now to wait the customary three weeks and maybe they will tell me something. I'll post it here if I find anything else out.