Introduction
RedHen CRM is a native CRM solution for Drupal 7. If you haven't heard about it, check out our recent blog announcements. Mandrill is a pay-as-you-go transactional email service provided by MailChimp. This spring, ThinkShout was fortunate to have the opportunity to release a Mandrill integration module for Drupal.
In this brief tutorial, I'll show you how to quickly set up a bulk mailing tool in Drupal leveraging RedHen CRM, Views Bulk Operations (VBO), and Mandrill.
Getting Started
This tutorial assumes that you have a RedHen CRM instance up and running. If you haven't played around with RedHen yet, you can get started with our demo installation profile.
Once you have RedHen running, you simply need to download and enable VBO and the Mandrill module.
Configuring the Mandrill Module
Your next step is to set up a Mandrill account and configure your API keys. (Don't worry, Mandrill has a very generous freemium plan - so you can test things out without needing to pay.) Below is a screenshot of Mandrill's API credentials interface:
Next, you'll need to set your API key and configure the Mandrill module:
That's it! Now we're ready to create our bulk mailing interface with VBO.
Building Your Bulk Mailer in VBO
RedHen CRM ships with a custom VBO action for sending email to RedHen contacts:
When used on a RedHen Organization, this same action will send an email to the primary contact of each selected organization. In this simple example, we will create a VBO view that allows us to filter contact records based upon their RedHen membership status:
Of course, this is just one example of how you can build your own VBO-enabled Views of RedHen data. For a quick start, consider creating some active memberships on contacts and importing this Views export into your copy of the RedHen Demo install profile.
Now Send Some Mail!
That's all it takes. Using the example bulk mailer interface above you can quickly select one or more contacts to email and then click "Send RedHen Email". From there, you can write a rich-text message including trackable URL links:
Upon sending, Mandrill will provide you with email statistics within your Drupal site:
In Conclusion
Obviously this is a pretty simple example of a bulk mailing tool. You can do considerably more advanced things mixing and matching RedHen, VBO and Mandrill. You could also trigger automated mass mailings leveraging RedHen, Mandrill, and Rules.
Our purpose here is to highlight the flexibility and unlimited possibilities of RedHen CRM and associated modules. We look forward to you sharing your own RedHen recipes with us in the future!
Comments
Mandrill and Drupal Commerce
I've been using Mandrill for all Drupal transactional email for a while now. I love it, great work on creating the Drupal module for it.
Your article got me thinking: Mandrill + Drupal Commerce could work nicely.
I have this case where I want to email all purchasers of a certain product when there is a product update.
(Or email them x weeks after purchase about how they feel about the product, or 2 days after they've watched video 2 of a digital course or so (the last two are basically autoresponders).
I was thinking Mailchimp Groups, but that way users need to be subscribed to the general list to be put into the 'receive product x updates' group.
Another way is to create a separate MailChimp list for every product, but that doesn't look right if there are more than 5 products :)
the Mandrill way:
It could work if I can generate a View of all purchasers of 'product x' that checked a box with their order to 'receive important info about product updates' and apply a VBO email action.
We need to register a users preference about receiving product updates. Not sure yet on what level that should be (user/order/product). I feel it needs to be as simple as possible for the user, so showing a user a 'keep up2date with this product checkbox per product seems too much.
Not sure how that relates to RedHen, but you'll probably have some ideas about that :)
Add a "Keep me informed" field on the customer entity bundle
I'd probably just add a field to the customer entity bundle in Drupal Commerce. Should be a really easy recipe! Good luck!!
How it relates to RedHen...
In my experience, the "Send RedHen Email" action only works on RedHen contacts. So, this means you'd have to write a simple hook (or Rule, using the Rules module) that creates a RedHen contact each time a user is created (or, alternately, every time an order is completed).
It's pretty simple to have automatically-created RedHen contacts, and each contact can be pretty lightweight (i.e. E-mail, Name, and I'd suggest an email-permissions field for spam regulations). Then, you create a VBO view of RedHen contacts that meet certain criteria (taking the email-permissions into account), and send it off. Mandrill tracks bounces, spam complaints, and so on, so you can either manually 'unsubscribe' people using this, or, if you're feeling brave, you can write code that will process bounces from Mandrill and automatically do the unsubscribing in code.
You could use "Product X" as a Views Exposed Filter, so that you could send bulk emails to purchasers of several different products at once, if you wanted.
Bulk mail vs transactional email
Are there any rules for Mandrill regarding bulk mail like this? I ask because transactional SMTP servers usually do not allow bulk mail sending...
Yes, you can send bulk
Hi - I'm the project lead for Mandrill, so I can answer this...
Mandrill does allow bulk emails to be sent through the system. We try to be as neutral a platform as possible for all kinds of (legal, non-spam) emails. You may want to set up separate accounts for bulk and transactional though, as lots of bulk traffic can cause your transactional email to wait in a queue (fixing that is on the roadmap).