[consulting] What do you use for your email newsletters?

[Tim Deeson]

Hi Michael

I think a drop down with various appropriately sized geographic areas  
would be useful. Using a touring band as an example you would probably  
be interested if they visited a neighbouring city as you may go over  
and hook up with a friend or be willing to travel because of a more  
convenient date etc. Or checkboxes showing cities of interest if a  
really granular solution is required, this probably just wouldn't  
scale very well to more than a single country's major cities.

I think an IP based solution could be unreliable, for example our  
ISP's IPs all give a location a few hundred miles away at their NOC.  
You would need to give users a way to override and then you would  
still need an interface to allow them to choose area.

Mailchimp for example has an API so that you can integrate your own  
custom forms with custom data collection or you can just use their  
vanilla stuff to collect custom data. Either way you can then send to  
appropriate splits on the list. If you wanted to collect, store and  
manage in Drupal for elegance than a CSV export to the mailing system  
might be best.

Cheers

Tim
www.deeson.co.uk/emedia/

On 10 Mar 2008, at 18:39, consulting-request at drupal.org wrote:

> Thanks Tim...
>
> So ... when you say collect it on newsletter signup, you mean that  
> the user would be presented with checkboxes (or some form element)  
> that has regional data, and the user would select which one(s) they  
> are interested in, the same way the user would sign up for different  
> interest categories, right?
>
> Here's my situation.  The site is for a band that will have fans  
> signing up from different parts of the world, mostly UK and US.
>
> I think this method works well for selecting the country or even  
> large geographical regions like "mid west", but it already becomes  
> more difficult to manage when we get to the state level of  
> geography, and ideally for a site like this, we would want to be  
> able to send out notifications if the band goes to a specific city.
>
> and thanks Trevor ...
>
> I was thinking that using geo and location module would solve this  
> problem, but I haven't worked with it before and think that it's  
> probably way out of the budget alloted for this project.  Perhaps  
> it's easier to do that I think.  The other catch with this method is  
> that if I'm using Drupal to produce lists of users to send  
> newsletter items to, what would be the best way to pass that custom  
> list into a third-party provider like mailchimp or constant  
> contact?  I guess something like Views Mail - http://drupal.org/project/views_mail 
>  would work well for this, but I definitely want to use a third- 
> party vendor for email management unless there are really good  
> reasons not to.  I just feel that the benefits of the reporting,  
> standards compliance and strong servers are too compelling.
>
> Thanks again.
>
> MikeyLikesIt