Installation
Once installed, this add-on's feature-set will appear on the Concrete5 dashboard, under the 'Communicate' heading.
If you're having problems, before contacting us, have a look at the potential 'gotchas' which are highlighted below, first.
Overview
This page shows any draft messages which have been saved, though not yet sent, as well as the last five sent messages with some basic summary data on 'Opens', 'Clicks' and 'Unsubscribes'. More detailed reporting for each message is available by clicking the 'View Statistics' button against the required message. Data on messages sent more than five messages ago can be accessed in the 'Reports' dashboard option under Communicate, or as 'Communicate Analytics' under the Concrete 5 Reports dashboard option.
Create/Send
This is where messages are composed and sent, or optionally saved as draft. It should be fairly obvious how this interface is intended to work, but there are a couple of things to note.
Subscribers can be in any group, so you can pick and choose the groups to which you wish to send email. To opt a user into your mailings you can set the 'Communicate Subscribe', custom attribute for each user. If there are no groups available to send to in the Create/Send page, you have no users with the custom attribute 'Communicate Subscribe' set to 'yes' - just visit the Users section of Concrete5, and edit the user to set this attribute to 'yes' for them.
If you have enabled public registration on your Concrete5 website, people can subscribe during their registration, by checking a 'Subscribe to emails' box. This will set the 'Communicate Subscribe' custom attribute for that user to 'yes'. Users imported via Communicate will be subscribed as part of the import process.
Formigo Communicate is designed to allow you to send email from any user in the Administrators group. If you wish to send from the super user 'admin' account, you must first add this user to the 'Administators' group. If you have no options in the 'Message From' select box, you will need to assign a user to the Administrators group of your website.
You can include the token [unsubscribe] anywhere in your message and it will be replaced with an unsubscribe link in the sent message. The advantage here is that you can choose how where it should be included. If it is not included via token, it will be added automatically at the foot of your email, so an option to unsubscribe will always be in any emails sent from Communicate.
Reports
A full message history is available in the reports section. Next to each message there is the option to delete the message and it's associated statistics, and also an option to 'View Statistics' for each message.
When clicking 'View Statistics', statistics provided include total 'Opens' and 'Clicks' by hour for the first 24 hours after the message was sent. Unique 'Opens','Clicks' and 'Unsubscribes' as well as total 'Opens', 'Clicks' and 'Unsubscribes' detailed by user.
Import
This is a very simple import routine that will allow you to upload a CSV file with users to import into your Concrete5 website. The csv file must contain three columns; username, password and email address. You are able to choose which group to add the users to during import, but they will be subscribed to Communicate automatically. The import routine will log entries it could not import. For example if the username exists twice in the file, or the username is already in use on your Concrete5 website, or the data is not in the required format, this will be logged and presented at the end of the import routine.
Please note
Maintaining a white-listed server (for email) is a bit complex. Not all hosts are equal here. If you want reliable email delivery make sure your host is up to it or, opt to send via a specialist smtp server service such as SendGrid.
Tracking, relies on a small 1 pixel image being served. Bigger paid-for email marketing applications also work the same way. This means that for an open to register that image must be downloaded. Statistics can be distorted if this image is not downloaded by default when the email may infact have been read.