Viart Shop

Newsletter is an excellent way to inform your customers about any events occurring at your web-site.

With ViArt CMS you can create newsletters, store and resend them. There is also a wide variety of options when selecting recipient groups as well as create new ones.

In order to manage your newsletters please go to Administration > System > Newsletter. Since you have hardly sent any news already, all you can see right now is the 'No records' message. Click the 'Add Newsletter' link.

As any e-mails in ViArt CMS you have to fill out a few fields with proper information. They are as following:

• Is Active defines the newsletter status; the three of them are Ready for sending (the check box is ticked off), Non active (the check box is cleared), Sent (the check box is ticked off but the newsletter has already been sent).

Note: The system will alert you in case you are trying to send a newsletter that has already been sent and block the sending.

• Date presents the date and time when the newsletter was created.
• Type defines the message format, namely HTML or Plain Text. Setting the 'Type' radio button to 'HTML' allows sending emails in HTML format, thus HTML tags will be used for formatting the message as HTML. The 'Plain text' option discards any HTML formatting - the message will be sent as it is.
• From, Reply To, Return Path and Subject have the same functions as usual e-mail fields. Note that if left blank, site administrator e-mail will be used.

Now you can compose the message body and enter into the text area below.

The last step is indicating the recipients. By default there are four groups, three of which you can edit. (See the picture below.)

• Subscribed customers. If ticked off, the newsletter will be sent to the customers who expressed their wish when registering; the option can also be enabled later on their profile page (User Home > Change details).
• Registered customers. You can distinguish all your registered customers by types; presently there is only one check box, however, you can add as many as you need. For more information about customer types see section 3.2.
• Customer purchased products. Here all order statuses existing in the system are listed. Again, you can remove or add new ones as you like.
• Administrators. The check boxes can be used for internal newsletters or in case you want to make a test. Note that the grouping is by privilege groups. For more information about privilege groups see section 4.1.

Click the 'Add Newsletter' button in order to save the newsletter or 'Cancel' to leave without saving.

After adding a newsletter you will be returned to the previous page and your screen should look like the following:

As you can see the letter is saved and ready for sending. Note that there is an option for sorting newsletters by their ID, Subject and Date as well as edit. For now, click the 'Send' link.

Here you can look through the newsletter and set up the sending cycle, namely the number of e-mails sent at a time and the delay period between letters.

Click the 'Start Sending Newsletter' button to start the distribution or click the 'Close Window' if you want to make some corrections.

At the end of the process the system will show you the results.