Often business or club owners would like to author a regular newsletter to stay in touch with customers or members. With all of the issues related to SPAM and internet privacy, unsolicited commercial e-mail (abbreviated as UCE) is a serious issue.
Laws including the CANSPAM requirements in the United States and PIPEDA in Canada place restrictions around how e-mail can collected and sent. Before you send an e-mail, you are required to be able to demonstrate that the person you are sending to has expressed an interest in your organization or your goods or services. Otherwise that e-mail is considered will be considered unsolicited commercial e-mail (or SPAM) in the eyes of the law.
In the Member Management section of this manual we explain how the member database is a repository for all of the information about people who have registered an account on your site. Normally when people register, they provide information including their name, contact information and e-mail address. As member information is collected, any e-mail addresses in your member directory become candidates to send e-mail to.
Setting up a Quick Subscribe Panel
Another easy way to collect e-mail addresses for your newsletter, and to ensure that you have the recipients permission to send them is to implement a "Quick Subscribe" to the newsletter.
This provides a fast newsletter subscription panel that requires a users only to enter their e-mail address and not bother with filling in a complex form. The steps involved in turning this feature on are described below.
Setup a Newsletter Group
The first step is setting up a “Member Type” that people who subscribe to your newsletter will be placed into automatically. We recommend setting up a group called “Newsletter” for this purpose. In order to create the “Newsletter” member type (or verify that one already exists):
While logged in as an administrator, select “System Setup” from the side panel menu
Select “Categories & Definitions”
Select “Member Types”
Ensure that there is a "Member Type short name” called “Newsletter”. You can also provide a descriptive name for this member group such as “Newsletter Recipients” or whatever is appropriate for your organization.
Once we verify that there is a Newsletter member type, we can enable the automated collection of addresses.
Select “System Setup” while logged in as an administrator
Select "Preferences" followed by “Side Panels”
Scroll to the “Newsletter Subscribe” section below
Once you have turned this feature on, after giving your web page an opportunity to refresh (you may force this to happen by logging out and in again), you will see a new element called “Newsletter Subscription” appear on your web page. Visitors to your website can now quickly enter their e-mail address using this feature and be “subscribed” to your newsletter in seconds. Because only the e-mail address is known, when you look at your “Manage Members” screen, you will see people who subscribe in this method as having a first name and last name set to “none”.
In our example we automatically insert new subscribers into the category called "Newsletter", how this can be any valid member category that you have defined in your Member Type setup under Categories & Definitions.
Over time you can enter more information in the member database as Newsletter subscribers become customers and are better known to you using the “Manage Members” option.
The approach described above is also a quick way to add someone to your newsletter list if you’re speaking to a prospective customer on the phone and don't have time to fill in a lengthy form.