Send newsletters from Standard ERP using Mailigen

What is Mailigen?

Mailigen is newsletter creation and automation platform. Platform offers management of contact lists, creation of letter templates using WYSIWYG e-mail template editor, analysing campaign results and more. We can send Standard ERP customer letters such as announcements or adverts using them as delivery mechanism.

What are the benfits?

There are multiple benefits using Mailigen instead of delivery of e-mails through your SMTP server:

• specialised delivery mechanism for mass mail - they make sure that everything is OK with spam filters and other issues that might arise when trying to send large newsletters out using normal SMTP server. In most cases it is not even allowed by the SMTP provider to send campaign letters
• possibility to create beautiful e-mail templates for your letters with ease
• tracking of your e-mail campaign such as who opened e-mails, who clicked on links etc. to be able to follow up and analyse efficiency of the campaign

Read more on Mailigen features

How to start with Mailigen

1. You need to subscribe for a Mailigen account or start with a trial account
2. You need to create an API key from Mailigen admin interface and send to us
3. We will set up code for you that will be able to communicate with Mailigen from Standard ERP

After the technical set up is done you need to manually transfer your contacts from Standard ERP to Mailigen (automated transfer is planned in the future versions).

The logic is that you need one subscribers list per customer category and one for all of your contacts. When a new Customer letter is sent to Mailigen Standard ERP will ask Mailigen to use the appropriate list based on the selected Customer category in the Customer letter.

So for example if you have three customer categories in Standard ERP then you would create these Subscriber lists with appropriate names as shown in table:

{
  "cube_name": "HansaWorld CRM",
  "cube_reports": [ {
     "name": "All customer e-mails",
     "result_view": "table",
     "definition": {"columns":{"dimensions":[{"name":"Measures","selected_set":["[Measures].[Customer e-mail]","[Measures].[Customer primary contact]"],"members":null}]},"rows":{"dimensions":[{"name":"Customer","selected_set":["[Customer].[Customer].Members"],"members":null,"bookmarked_members":null}],"filter_by":{"conditions":[{"expression":["[Measures].[Customer e-mail]"],"operator":"matches","value":".+@.+"}]},"nonempty_crossjoin":true},"pages":{"dimensions":null},"options":{"nonempty":true},"view":{"current":"table","maximized":false,"table":{}}}
  } ],
  "calculated_members": [{"name":"Customer e-mail","dimension":"Measures","formula":"[Customer].CurrentMember.getProperty('E-mail')","format_string":""},{"name":"Customer primary contact","dimension":"Measures","formula":"[Customer].CurrentMember.getProperty('Primary contact')","format_string":""}]
}

How to send a letter from Standard ERP

1. Create a template you will use to format this e-mail. You can create one from scratch or use their provided templates, but the main thing is that you need to have a code of the template without any spaces and in capital letters. For this example I will use one called USER-PASSWORDS:
   
2. Create a new letter in CRM>>Register>>Customer Letters
3. Select either specific customer or put an asterisk * in the customer field to send for all customers matching other criteria
4. Select whether to send only to primary contact person or all of the

5. Select customer category to send the e-mails to (or enter All to use special customer Subscriber list All)

   A contact list with the name (not code) of the category will be searched for in Mailigen

6. If applicable select one or more classifications to filter down the contacts accordingly
7. Enter the subject of the e-mail
8. Enter the template name from above in the field Document (e.g. USER-PASSWORDS)
9. Select the person that should be placed in the Reply to of the e-mail
10. Check the list of the recipients via Operation>>Letter List. If happy with that mark the letter as OKed
11. Run Operations>>Create Mailigen campaign. This will create a campaign on Mailigen side. Due to different business checks we can't send the campaign immediately
12. Click Open Mailigen campaign button to go to Mailigen and send the campaign
    

How to set up Mass Mail package on server

These are main steps for setup:

• install nodejs (for example: https://docs.aws.amazon.com/sdk-for-javascript/v2/developer-guide/setting-up-node-on-ec2-instance.html)

• link mailigen folder to SERP root folder for example

  ln -s git/mailigen mailigen

• install node package in mailigen folder (for example nmp install xmlhttprequest)
• in SERP set up Timed Event MassMailCheckMn that will periodically update campaign status from Mailigen (i.e. is it created)
• Add Mailigen settings in CRM > Settings > Mailigen Settings
  • Script runner - node (or full path to node, if just node does not work)
  • Campaign file location path - location, where the generated campaign files will be located. These indicate, which campaigns have been created. Example - tmp-mailigen/. The folder must exist!
  • Mailigen file location path - location, where the mailigen filed are located. In a previous step, the git/mailigen folder was linked to mailigen, so this should be mailigen/
  • API key - From Mailigen > Settings > API keys

Troubleshooting: 

• If a mailigen.json file is created in the mailigen/ folder, with the corresponding letterNr, but a campaign has not been created, then that means that the HAL side has worked and the script has not been run - problem with either Script runner being defined incorrect or Campaign file location path. The folder must exist beforehand.
• If it is possible to run node from the command line in the server folder and it executes without errors, but it does not work when running from the Letter, then that means that the Script runner is defined incorrect. On a successful run, a file should be made in the defined Campaign file location (mailigen+letterNr_timenow)