Newsletters are emails containing information or promotions that you, as a shop owner, wish to send to your registered customers. In some countries, the newsletter recipient has to explicitly agree to receive such information through a checkbox or the so-called “double opt-in” method.

Email Format: HTML or Text
As you may know from your email client, you can choose whether (newsletter) emails should be sent in HTML or in plain text format. Usually, you will use HTML to mark up your text content as bold, italic or underlined, to use tables or to display images. This is not possible in plain text emails at all and it also depends on whether the recipient’s email client is configured to receive text or HTML emails. Thus, the MIME format was created, which sends along both text and HTML formats in the same message. Plain text will be displayed for recipients who only allow text emails, and HTML will be displayed for everybody else.

Transmission Agent: SMTP or Sendmail
Sendmail is a standard email transfer agent (client) for Unix-based systems that can be triggered by other clients on the same system to send email messages. You can install it on any arbitrary Linux machine of your choice and send messages from this server. However, it’s important to note that these days, all messages sent via this method will typically end up in the Spam folder of your recipient’s email client or may not even be forwarded by the server in between.

SMTP as a server protocol, is supposed to be a more secure solution. In most cases, the SMTP server accepts email forwarding requests coming only from localhost (the server where your online shop is hosted). Using an SMTP server on another system is nearly impossible as this SMTP could be misused as an email relay.

Filter Lists: Don’t Think Only Black and White
To avoid email spam, many different mechanisms have been developed during the last few years. One of them is the black-, white- or grey-listing method. A blacklisted server or IP range on the recipient’s machine, for example, is barred from delivering emails to the recipient at all. In the past, providers for black, white and grey lists developed and these lists are used by regular ISPs and hosting service providers.

If the server of your hosting provider has been blacklisted, you can assume that none of your emails will reach their intended recipients. Most professional email marketing providers by the way, have contracts with these list providers to ensure they are whitelisted and can transmit large amounts of email .

Grey lists cover everything in between. If you are not on a blacklist or on a whitelist, a filter on the recipient’s Website will put your email into a queue and check for other spam indicators (like content). If this queue gets too many requests at a certain time, your email might take a few hours or even days to be passed through to the recipient.

Email Transmission Tools
Newsletter emails, even to a large number of recipients, can be send via various email client applications and servers. You have wide choice depending on your given circumstances in respect of the above technical facts. Let me introduce you to some of the options.

Standalone Client Programs
It is possible to send multiple-recipient emails via an email client like Mozilla Thunderbird or Microsoft Outlook. For data privacy, you must ensure that none of your clients can see other email addresses in the message: add yourself to the TO field while putting a list of your newsletter subscribers in the BCC field. Avoid using CC (from my own experience ).

As far as I know, an Exchange server will accept 200 recipients with one dispatch. Also, under this method, it is not possible to enrich the content of your email with dynamically generated data.  For example, it won’t be possible to inform your clients about cross-selling products on the basis of their previous purchases.

Integrated Shopping Cart Solutions
This is differently handled in shopping cart solutions, as they usually provide the ability to send email newsletters to opted-in customers and also to enter product data with the newsletter. Using this option, you can define personalized content using the order history of each costumer. For example (independent of any legal requirement), you could ask Mrs. Meyers for a review of the suit case “Canoono I Pak Classic” she bought on August 16th 2011, promising to raffle off a voucher of 100 EUR for the most inventive review. It’s great technology, but you must be careful that you don’t end up on a blacklist somewhere…

The OXID eShop newsletter feature can help a little bit here as it sends out newsletters in batches (number adjustable from the admin panel).  But at the end of the day, every newsletter transmission could be misunderstood by your hosting service provider, by list providers as well as by the recipient’s servers. In short, if you have too many recipients with too much similar content, it is time to begin thinking about using a professional, whitelisted email marketing provider.

Unfortunately, I can’t tell you the “magic number” of newsletters that will work properly from your shop server as I think it depends on your hosting provider, your monthly newsletter frequency and the number of newsletter recipients.

Open Source Scripts
There are a number of  scripts (some open source) that can apply to the same needs. However, they too will break down when faced with black- and grey- lists.

Summary

As your customers grow in number, you certainly will have to think about a professional (white listed) solution for your newsletter emails. This solution should ideally provide an interface to your shopping cart to compute the opted-in addressees as well as product items and order details. There are already a number of solutions available but there should definitely be more… right?

Please write to the email marketing provider of your choice and ask if they provide an interface to OXID eShop. Also, please feel free to contact me personally – I would be happy to support you from this end with contacting the channel marketeers of those services.

I personally was really surprised to see 16 people attending, including developers from our partners D³ Data Development (Thalheim, Saxony), GN2 netwerk (Coburg, Bavaria), marmalade.de (Magdeburg, Saxony-Anhalt), dotSource GmbH (Jena, Thuringia) and Ontraq Europe (Augsburg, Bavaria). Dirk Senebald (Gera, Thuringia), Gregor Berg (Dortmund, North Rhine-Westphalia) and Alexander Thomas (Berlin) also took part, together with my personal friends and (former) co-workers Mathias Fiedler (Leipzig/Berlin) and Erik Kort.

Christian Zacharias explains

Joscha Krug proudly shows off his OXID Commons shirt

These guys found something really interesting

Our host, Hannes from Geyserhaus, worked really professionally to ensure that everything was set up for us. The projector and the screen were already installed, together with the tables and power cords. Fortunately, there was no Internet connection; this allowed us all to concentrate on  Christan Zacharias‘ talk about the OXID eShop framework, the OXID eFire platform, how to write extensions, and news for developers in OXID eShop 4.5.0.

The entire talk took about six hours including interposed questions, laid-back discussions and straight comments to OXID’s (Erik’s and mine) point of view. We also had an interesting four-person discussion about the pros and cons of Open Source Software. Through the process, I picked up at least 25 points to be “injected” into OXID’s product management cycle. Thanks for all the comments, mates!

At the end of the day, I think the aims of a meeting like this – namely, getting to know the faces behind forum or mailing list posts, learning about the experiences of others and bringing coders together for collaboration chances – were absolutely fulfilled, and that it was an enjoyable and learning experience for all.

I’m curious now about upcoming meetings in other cities like Berlin, Stuttgart, Hamburg, Munich (in progress), Cologne and Frankfurt. Are any of you keen to take over the organization of such meetings? Drop me a line or post a comment if so!

Analyzing the status quo, I found three different account formats for OXID eSales that have been created some-when by somebody:

• The OXID ESales account,
• an OXID eSales group
• and an OXID eSales page.

The Facebook Account already had friends, the Group had members and the Page had so called fans.

Accounts and Friends

Using an account for your company or brand seems to be a bad idea, especially when the correct writing of your brand is important. As you can see, it was impossible to write “eSales” as Facebook assumes a natural person with a first and a last name and camel-cases the words. The content was filled up with automated twitter feeds. And although it was shown on your friends walls, it had very low activity that could not even be measured. If you wanted to post using your brand, you had to be logged in as “OXID ESales”. As e-mail address, a collective e-mail account was chosen that nobody felt responsible for.

We decided to ditch this account completely. Thus, I informed all friends of the OXID ESales account via the Facebook message service which doesn’t allow more than 20 addressees at once. It had to be done tick-wise…

Groups and Members

Let us have a look at the Facebook group OXID eSales. What apparently catches our eyes is that the writing of the name is correct in this case. The followers of a group are called “members”. Posts do not appear at your members’ walls automatically, they have to visit the group site to gather the news you want to spread. Due to this, the non-measurable activity was pretty low as well. Also, posts are shown from the person who entered it, branding is not possible (except you are logged in as OXID ESales). Bad premises for our mission and inappropriate. Obviously, a group has to be treated similar to a forum which doesn’t make sense because we have our own

We decided to ditch this site as well by July 1st. The members were informed by a message of the group administrator (me) that unfortunately took nearly 20 hours for delivery.

Pages and Fans

A page seems to be the ultimate solution. As a page administrator, you must have your personal account but writing to the page, your entry is branded! I.e., if I write to the OXID_eSales page, I can use my personal account marco.steinhaeuser and the entry appears as written by OXID_eSales without any hassle logging out and in again. The posts appear on the time line of your “fans” so they can interact immediately. This interaction is measurable: Especially interesting is a graph that also can display who hided your posts.

While investigating, I found an OXID eSales page in the wrong category “local business” that I really wanted to change into “product/service”. Unfortunately, on Facebook it is not possible to change the category after the page was generated. So I had to install a complete new page and to inform the fans of the old page about it. As features for the new page, I just left the “wall”, the information page, fotos (still to equip) and the event application.

Content

Most of the content of the new OXID_eSales page is parsed automatically via the Twitterfeed service, as is:

• shops on OXID
  every shop owner or developer can post his new shop to the Mister Wong or to delicious.com bookmark service with the tag oxid-shop where a RSS feed is generated and posted to twitter and Facebook
• new extensions for OXID eShop
  new extensions and modules on OXID eXchange are parsed to a RSS feed and will be twittered and facebooked
• news on OXID projects
  front page news a project responsible person published on OXID projects
• new or updated feature requests for OXID eShop
• new entries of OXID planet
  blog posts about and around OXID that are implemented in OXID planet
  (You are welcome to join, feel free to contact me!)
• new blog entries on oxid-esales.com

Facebook User Names

A very interesting feature on Facebook is the so called “user name” for your page which actually means a shortened URL. Every Facebook user can fire up http://www.facebook.com/username/ to get his own shortened URL like http://www.facebook.com/marco.steinhaeuser. If you are a page administrator, you will find a field for your page name there in case you have more than 25 fans. We really wanted to give the OXID page the same format as it is on twitter, (with an underscore) but unfortunately, on Facebook it isn’t allowed as well as a hyphon in your name. Another idea was to name it simply http://www.facebook.com/OXID but the appendix at least have to have five or more characters. At the end of the day, we will call it http://www.facebook.com/OXID.eSales but this name is still occupied by the OXID ESales account and will be cancelled by July 1st.

Market your Page

There are several ways to make your page visible to others. The aim is to gather as many fans as possible to spread your news to many people.
Facebook offers a planty of scripts that you can implement into your website. In our case, we will use a simple “like” button to be implemented into oxid-esales.com as well as on OXID forge. When a Facebook user visits our official sites and presses this button, he will immediately become a fan with a simple click and our news will appear on his timeline from now on.
Every fan has the possibility to recommend this page to his (assorted) friends which gives your marketing a highly viral touch.
Further, Facebook offers plans for payed ads that I didn’t give a deeper look yet.

Appearance and Usability

A very interesting effect on Facebook seems to be the low barrier for interaction of your fans with your page. Although our visitors saw and knew that the content is generated automatically, they immediately started commenting on the posts, e.g. about a new store online. Of course you have to be present and react on their comments and discuss with them.
In my opinion, the reason for this low barrier can be found in the web techniques: The extensive use of AJAX makes it possible to get statuses changed immediately without the need of reloading the complete page. I.e., for the users it is pretty easy, quickly done and fun to press a “like” button or to leave a shorter or longer comment without any restrictions. For you, as the page owner it is perfect seeing any interaction publically. If somebody pressed the “like” button, he feels comfortable with the content and actually recognized it!

Conclusion

Although Facebook is on the headlines and has to be seen highly critical in a manner of privacy, it seems to be a perfect addition to your existing community tools. For OXID eSales, of course it will not replace other community tools like the forum or OXID forge but it is a nice way to spread our news, to keep people informed and to gather the reactions.

If you want to stay informed about all the OXID news and you have a Facebook account yourself, feel free to like our page: ]]> http://www.marco-steinhaeuser.de/streamlining-oxid-facebook-properties.html/feed 0 http://www.marco-steinhaeuser.de/my-impressions-of-chemnitz-linux-tage-2010.html http://www.marco-steinhaeuser.de/my-impressions-of-chemnitz-linux-tage-2010.html#comments Wed, 17 Mar 2010 10:05:45 +0000 Marco Steinhäuser http://www.marco-steinhaeuser.de/?p=306 More or less spontaneously, I decided to go to “Chemnitzer Linux-Tage” for the first time, the probably second biggest Linux event in Germany, and was really surprised: Not only Linux geeks but a very mixed up audience of Germans and Non-Germans, developers, administrators and interested people in any kind of open source software found together in a very familiar and comfortable atmosphere.

In my role as OXID Community Guide I usually go to such events to talk to owners of interesting projects and maybe find synergies and a surplus for the OXID community. The entry fee at € 5.- was more than reasonable and to be honest: I found more valuable contacts there than on my CeBIT visit a couple of days before.

Of course, I visited the booth of my favorite Linux distribution run by the guys of Ubuntu Deutschland e.V. and furthermore, the Communtu project. Communtu is a Ubuntu based Linux distribution that lets you choose which application projects to install but most interesting is the backup feature: When you have to refresh your installation (what may happen from time to time), you are able to store your complete configuration to the Communtu server and moreover, download a CD or DVD for your new installation without loosing any application.

Also the PIM and CRM project tine 2.0 is absolutely worth mentioning. Tine is based on the Zend Framework and makes extensive use of the JavaScript library jQuery. The project is still young, doesn’t provide that many features that you would expect and really took me some time to install it today. But from it’s approach, it is very promising and the code looks clear on a first glance.

YaCy is a Java based search engine software that I hope to get evaluated for use on oxid-esales.com as well as on OXIDforge as a replacement for the Google search service we implemented presently.

After listening to two talks about IT management and OTRS (Open Ticket Request System) I hooked up with the OTRS guys Shawn and Martin and apparently it turned really, really, really interesting. We use this Perl-based software very successfully in our support department and our installation needs to be adapted for our needs. Shawn is the new OTRS Community Manager and Martin actually the inventor of the OTRS system. Hope to collaborate very tightly with this guys in the future.

For the next year, I personally would really like to have an OXID booth at the “Chemitzer Linux-Tage”. Let’s see whether we can sort it out.

Thanks Erik for the lift!

Konstantin and Vadim gladly sent to me the Russian translation for the OXID eShop front end as well as for the administration area. Both files have been published on the language site of OXIDforge. Feel free to use them in your own online shop instance.

To be honest, I am pretty glad we have Russian now for several reasons. Firstly, I believe Russia (and former member states of the Soviet Republic) are a huge and growing business region in ecommerce. Hence it would be great to grow an even larger Russian OXID eShop community and attract more developers. Last not least, it’s a great opportunity for me to practice my rusty Russian in the forums

Константин и Вадим – спосибо большое, вы молодцы!

Now “OXID developer network – ODN” is about to win that race and I personally like it very much. I already requested an additional subdomain like odn.oxidforge.org for it.

Like Ralf posted today to our corporate blog, a separate user was introduced for that kind of stuff called OXIDlab “… where we publish prototypes or test implementations, which are prepared by our teams. These results of our daily work are very often the first steps to new features for our products … ” like he says. He already uploaded the first finished extension, “SuperClix Export“, to OXID eXchange – the module market place.

Well, and I am still hassling around with that bl**dy SVN+SSH write access to the projects SCM sites on http://dev.oxidforge.org. Reading SVN works properly as committing is followed by an error message like “Authorization refused”. Will get it fixed by the next week, promised!

There is just one thing we are still suffering from: How the heck shall we call that baby?
Of course, “collaboration and development platform” or even the URL name is much too long while “dev” is too short and not very meaningful. How about something like “developer zone” or “com-zone”? The word “forge” is already occupied by the whole OXIDforge thing including download pages and so on.

Let me know about your ideas.

Unfortunately, Mister Wong doesn’t speak “Globish”, everything you will find on the .de site would be in German. If you are not a German native speaker you might don’t understand the handling there. In this case you are welcome to open up another – your – OXID eShop – group at the .com site of Mister Wong.

Of course, you may use Portuguese lang.php as an additional language if you run your shop somewhere else then Portugal. Just make sure you translated your products and categories as well.

Also, an Italian fellow, tassoman, found his way back to the forums and promised an Italian translation to come up soon. His request for implementing gettext is interesting enough: AFAIK the PHP library “gettext” has got a lot of clients that would make both, front and back end translations pretty easy. I handed that proposal over to OXID’s shop product management.

For future, maybe we could use the new collaboration plattform on OXIDforge that we are working on for translation stuff as well as for new themes, templates or modules. It will open up the next few days.