Mark et al,
In talking to our users, there appear to be a great potential for a newsletter plugin.
Here is the user case.
To many small business owners, running their own newsletters on something like a WordPress site using Mailchimp or ActiveCampaign is hassle without great returns.
Think about the target audience they try to attract.
Going from one small business's site to another, feels like a big hassle.
However, if you have a place where many small business owners pool their newsletters together, it will greatly improve my experience as a shopper. Think about food court in a shopping mall. Each provider is a small business. The variety attracts a lot of traffic, and everyone wins.
Same logic applies here.
And when a community provides a "newsletter food court", it is a value added service community owners can charge its business members.
Think about a small biz owner. Would you prefer paying 35 dollars doing things for yourself or join a community where you need to pay only 15 dollars a month to maintain a list of 2000 emails.
When local businesses find a site attractive and join, their active participation will enrich the content greatly which in turn attracts more users.
Here are the things our focus group, mostly small businesses thinking about joining a MooSocial network, would like to have:
1) Allow users to sign up by themselves to the newsletters based on what they want.
And the sign up process needs to be as simple as possible. Just click on a button saying I am interested would be good enough.
2) Allow certain levels of members to create their own newsletters and list them together.
MooSocial has all the key elements in the mail template addon. Make it available to members above a certain level.
And there is a great potential for MooSocial community owners to develop revenue streams.
3) Let it be powered by one mainstream mail service provider like Mailchimp, and one by basic email service provider like Amazon SES, Sendgrid or Sendinblue.
Here is one addon which looks very good.
This is for Socialengine.
I have a few comments:
1) it might be ambitious to develop something that include all its features. What about MooSocial team implement it in phases?
2) The biggest drawback of this plugin is that it does not allow members to create their own newsletters. No one on the market does that now. Looks like an interesting opening.
3) Minimize the templates available. Mailchimp offers a dozen templates. MooSocial mail template addon offers like 10. I would limit it to like 3 or 4, but do it very well.
4) statistics could leverage mailchimp or sendgrid or sendinblue. They all do a terrific job reporting these stats.
5) think about integration with Virtual Gift.
6) Here is one killer feature hidden. Let business users using this newsletter addon to build their own email list. Make it downloadable. Maybe integrate this feature with your Business Directory and Store add ons.
Jing
Sendgrid just completed an analysis. It has found that the median return on Email is 5 times that of Social Media.
The following is a quote.
"In fact, the median return on investment for email marketing is nearly five times greater than for social media marketing, according to eMarketer."
And I would argue that Facebook gotta be the lowest for small business.