Email marketing remains one of the most popular and powerful tools businesses have for communicating with customers and even internal employees. However, since everyone has one, or a few, email addresses, companies can have a pretty hard time managing those growing email lists. And wherever there is a problem, a company will come up with a paid solution, so companies such as MailChimp, SendGrid and more offer newsletter and mass email solutions. However, they come at a pretty big price, and the company will have another system to manage, more accounts to take care of when someone leaves and more training to do when someone joins.
That is why EnovaPoint created a product called JungleMail. JungleMail is an email and newsletter management solution that sits directly on SharePoint. By using SharePoint as your email and newsletter solution, you will add more ROI to the platform as well as have less security problems and training to do.
In this blog post we will review JungleMail, but before we do, here are a few words about the product from their site:
Review:
In this blog post I will review the SharePoint Server 2013 version of JungleMail. One thing that I advice is creating a dedicated Site Collection to JungleMail, as all the configuration is done via SharePoint list and JungleMail is creating quite a lot of them when you activate the feature. The positive point however, since hopefully all SharePoint users know what a list is, and it will be a lot easier for them to learn how to configure the product without going into complicated custom menus. Below you can see a preview of the lists created by JungleMail.
For this review, I simply had to configure a few lists such as the Topics and the Subscribers
Once I entered some contacts, I started creating my first email campaign. As you can see in the screen below, in the first screen I can setup the basic stuff from my newsletter. The feature that I liked is that you can use any custom SharePoint list, even one that comes from a BCS to send newsletters to. As long as you have a field containing the email address, you just select what the column name is in "Recipient list column" and you're good to go! So if you have all your subscribers in a SQL Database, as long as you have a column that stores the email address, whatever name it has you can use that database!
However, I only want to send this newsletter to customers interested in SharePoint. So, I will add an additional condition where topic must be equal to SharePoint.
Now, my total audience for this newsletter went from the five original, to the 2 that have SharePoint as an interest.
On the next screen you have everything you want from a newsletter creator. Plenty of templates to choose from, as well as the ability to edit them in Visual Mode for users like me who aren't really good at design, as well as a full HTML Designer so you can create your fully customized newsletter if you know how to do it in HTML.
And, of course you can also add information from the contact such as First Name, Last Name, etc. You can do that in the user interface, as well as directly in the HTML code if you prefer to create it that way.
Now, that I created my pretty newsletter, time to preview it. I found the ability to preview the newsletter for more than one person very cool, as I got to see if my column names worked correctly.
Time to send the newsletter! On the final screen we have the last options such as scheduling, enable or disable tracking and make it recurrent. I wanted to send it right away so I did.
When you click send, JungleMail adds your "job" to the queue and it gets sent within the next few minutes.
When the email arrived, I was happy that the format, and all the images looked good!
Other Features
Above was the main "Newsletter sending" part, so let me show you some other features of the product. For some of the screenshots, I used the ones from the JungleMail site, as they have a lot more content than my limited demo environmentJ. One feature that is a must have for any marketing tool is the analytics of emails sent, opened and how many people clicked the links. JungleMail has those as well, so you can determine what the best time to send is, as well as what subjects are the most opened.
You can also create your subscribe / unsubscribe forms directly as SharePoint webparts. One thing to remember is that if you want to make it public, your SharePoint Site collection will have to be publicly accessible from the internet! The same goes if you want to track clicks!
We have talked a lot about external users, however JungleMail can be used to send emails internally as well. One feature that I found extremely helpful for internal emails is their Repeater function. Let me show you how it works. First of all, I just went to my subscriber list, but instead of choosing the list as a Source, I choose an Active Directory Security Group containing my HR Department. (It has one account inside)
I then inserted a "Repeater" in my newsletter. A repeater allows you to include content from your site, such as news items with filters. In my following screenshot, I want to insert all the company news that the Audience is HR. Since I want to automatically send this email every week, I checked the box not to send emails if there is no content for this week. In a production environment, you would have a kind of "date" filter, however I did not include it in my demo.
Now, I have access to include columns from my Company News list, in this newsletter.
And here is the final result when I preview the newsletter. As you can see, my design skills are very good and I am able to create beautiful newsletters!
If you want to see a video of this feature and how to add a lot more features in it, check out this tutorial done by EnovaPoint where they also link the title to article, as well as make the newsletter a lot better lookingJ. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f8EogbgPU4c
From a more administrative point of view, you have the option to use a "custom" SMTP server such as SendGrid, in order to not put too much load on your internal Exchange environment, and you can also allow/block end users from changing SMTP or from/reply to email addresses.
Conclusion
With email being one of the most popular and powerful ways of communication, a lot of companies are looking to find systems in order to send marketing or informational emails to their employees, customers and general public. There are a lot of third party systems out there, however JungleMail delivers the same functionality, directly on SharePoint, therefore increasing your ROI and decreasing your training costs, since you only have to train users on one platform. Throughout my test, I didn't encounter any bugs and was able to create the newsletters and everything quite easily. I used other non-SharePoint email marketing tools in the past, and I was really amazed to see how friendly JungleMail is for a tool that is hosted on SharePoint. I also really loved the idea of the repeater, and being able to automatically send newsletter internally / externally with content created in SharePoint, and not having to create it twice! Furthermore, being able to send to Active Directory groups is a big advantage since that is how most company "group" their employees by department, or function.
One thing to make sure you think at when planning to use JungleMail, or any other "on premises" email management system is that for the "subscribe/unsubscribe" as well as tracking links, you will need to have a page that is accessible anonymously from the web in order for them to function properly. If you're looking for a Newsletter and Group Email Solution for SharePoint & Office 365, you should give JungleMail a try!
To learn more about JungleMail, visit their website by clicking on the logo below
by Vlad Catrinescu via Everyone's Blog Posts - SharePoint Community
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