Aleyant Systems: the Pressero Blog

MailChimp is a great email marketing service.  Besides having a lot of powerful features, MailChimp will give you a starter account for free, so you can try out email marketing without any financial investment.

We recently added a MailChimp integration to Pressero.  This integration will allow you to push users in any of your Pressero sites into any of the mailing lists you have created in MailChimp.  This article will guide you through the steps of importing users into MailChimp, as well as using the user date fields (account creation, last login, and last order dates) to segment your email marketing campaigns.

Step 1) Go to MailChimp.com and create an account.

Step 2) MailChimp has lots of great resources to help you better understand the ins and outs of email marketing.  It’s imperative you understand what is legitimate email marketing and what is spam.  Please invest the time to read through MailChimp’s resources.

Step 3) Once logged in, create a subscriber list by clicking on the “Create a Subscriber List” button.  Fill out the required information and click the “Save” button.

Step 4) This step is optional, however, it is highly recommended.  Go to the settings for the list and choose the “fields and merge tags” option.  Click on “add a field” and choose the “date” type.  Do this three times to create three fields, and name them “account creation date”, “last login date”, and “last order date”.  (You don’t need to use these exact names, just something along these lines)  Be sure to click “Save” when finished.

Create Fields in MailChimp

Step 5) Now you need to get an API key.  This will be used to authorize Pressero to push users into your mailing lists.  Go to Account –> API Keys & Authorized Apps.  If you don’t have any API Keys already created, click the “Add a Key” button.  Copy and paste the long alphanumeric API key that it creates.

Step 6) Login to your Pressero administrative account.  Navigate to the site you want to export users from and choose the Site Users option.  On the user admin page, expand the panel at the bottom that says “MailChimp Integration”.

Step 7) Enter your API key and click the “Connect to MailChimp” button.

Step 8) Select the list from the drop down box that will appear.

Step 9) Map the three date fields, assuming you created them (step 4).

Step 10) Click the “Export Users to MailChimp” button.  You’ll receive a message stating the export was successful.

Step 11) Now you are ready to send mailings to these users.  Consult the MailChimp help resources for more information on how to do this.

Step 12) We recommend you use the date fields to segment your mailings.  This will allow you to send more targeted messages to certain types of people.  For example:

• Customers who logged in recently but did not place an order.
• Customers that recently placed an order
• Customers that haven’t logged in quite some time

When you begin a campaign, choose the option to “Send to Segment”

Step 13) Add the conditions and then click the “use segment” button.

SantaSentMeALetter.com is a service that allows children to receive a letter from Santa that is rooted in the tradition of written messages sent through the postal service. Receiving a letter from Santa is a magical way to start the holiday season.

SantaSentMeALetter.com has delivered the magic of Christmas to children (and Adults too) throughout the United States, Canada and beyond for 5 seasons. Its letters from Santa are among the highest quality available; complete with a personal message from Santa, custom north pole postmark, and Santa’s own wax seal.

SantaSentMeALetter.com runs on Pressero and uses a standard site skin.

Pressero v4.11.9 was released on November 19.  As usual there are a number of fixes and tweaks.  But there are also a few new items worth mentioning:

1. Updated translations for Catalan, Chinese, and Turkish
2. You can now import locations for a b2b site in the admin.  Grab the excel template from the locations admin page, populate, and upload.
3. We’ve added a tax ID field at the site and user level.  This will typically be used for capturing a VAT id, but is flexible enough to be used for other purposes.  You can rename this field in site settings in the admin.
4. The language a site displays in has been driven by your customer’s browser settings.  This is still the default, however, you can now “force” the site to appear in a single language by enabling the culture lock option in site settings.
5. User import is now enabled for b2c sites.
6. Google site analytics has always been supported in Pressero v4.  This latest release adds support for Google Ecommerce Tracking.
7. We now have integration with MailChimp.  From the user admin area in a site, you can easily push users from Pressero into MailChimp.  You can optionally include date of account creation, last login, and last order… this has some very cool implications for targeted email marketing.   We’ll do a full blog post on this in the near future.