Lime CRM Newsletter

Lime CRM Newsletter is an add-on for creating and sending email newsletters, including management of all things related to these activities such as subscriber and mailing lists management.

If you're looking for requirements and how to install lime-newsletter head on over to the installation part.

Make sure these requirements are met for on-premise Lime environments.

Are you upgrading from lime-newsletter version 1?

It's easy - lime-newsletter 2 uses more or less the same tables and fields in Lime CRM. Add the missing required fields from here.

Then you need to make sure lime-newsletter is installed on the Lime server as in step 1. Then go to step 2 to configure lime-newsletter and the following steps.

Deactivate the version 1 Lime-newsletter integration found in Lime Marketing -> Administration -> Integrations.

Organizing your email send-outs

You can have different kinds of email campaigns (e.g newsletters, product information and agreement renewals). In order to distinguish between them in Lime CRM you should have one consent type for each kind of email campaign.

You can them map a consent type to one or more publications in Lime Marketing.
So if you have a consent type called "product information" in Lime CRM, you can map that to the publications "Product A customers" and "Product B customers".

Creating email campaign

You start out by creating a campaign in Lime CRM and adding participants to that campaign.
In the default configuration, the participants are assumed to be persons, but you can change that to whatever lime object you want using the Lime Admin config.

You should probably link a campaign to a consent type.

To design a nice-looking send-out, you should log in to Lime Marketing, select a template and use the editor to make it look fancy.

Sending

When done designing your send-out you will want to get the recipients. When pressing "Add recipient list" in Lime Marketing, this add-on will go fetch all campaigns found in Lime CRM for you to choose from (this will ignore status and type).
If a campaign is linked to a consent type, only people with the consent type will be added as recipients. If a campaign doesn't have a consent type, then all participants in the campaign will be added.

When the send-out is sent, a mailing and a list of recipients will be created in Lime CRM. The mailing will get the status "sent" and statistics will be added to the recipients.

Recipient statuses

If an email bounces, the status is set to "bounced". If a recipient opens the email, the status is set to "opened". If a recipient clicks on a link in the email, the status is set to "clicked". If a recipient opts out, the status is set to "opt-out".

The order above is also the priority of the status. So, if a recipient opts out and then clicks on a link in the email. The status will remain as "opt-out".

If we get a hard bounce (the e-mail address is invalid or doesn't exist anymore) the add-on will set the "email_hardbounce" field on the person card if present.

Opting in and out

The integration handles opt-in and opt-out events coming from Lime Marketing by using consents in Lime. If the consenttype mapping is set up the consents will control who is transferred to Lime Marketing when importing recipients to a send-out. Only approved consents for the marketing activity's specified consent type will be synced. Otherwise all participants from the marketing activity in Lime will be synced.

The following rules apply to opt-in:

  • If a person opts in to a publication configured in consenttype mappings those consents are updated/created and approved is checked.

  • If an unknown email opts in to a publication configured in optinsettings - a limeobject of your choice is created. If this feature is not active, an event will be published to the Lime CRM event queue containing the opt-in information.

And these are the rules for opt-out:

  • If person.totaloptout is checked - that person is not transferred to Lime Marketing.

  • If campaign.consenttype is set - only persons with an approved consent of that type is transferred to Lime Marketing and any opt-out data in Lime Marketing is removed for those persons. Lime is the master of consents.

  • If a person opts out from a publication configured in consenttypemappings - that/those consents are updated/created and approved is unchecked.

  • If a person opts out from a publication not configured in consenttypemappings but the campaign is using a consenttype - that consent is updated/created and approved is unchecked.

  • If a person total opt outs in Lime Marketing all the configured consenttypes are updated/created and approved is unchecked - person.totalopout is also set if that exists.

Statistics

Mailing and recipient data is available on each mailing and recipient. On the recipient you can see if it has been sent, opened, clicked or bounced. On the mailing you can view HTML tabs for statistics and the mailing layout. From version 2.6.0 it is also possible to see link click statistics on the mailing card.