After several long months of hard work, we’re pleased to announce the introduction of new mailer functionality to The HiVE. This represents a big upgrade to the platform, and will provide services akin to eDM solutions such as Mailchimp and Campaign Monitor, but seamlessly integrated into the architecture of the platform.

The Mailer will make it easy to manage your communications across the platform, continuously engage your members, and provide visibility of subscriber lists and campaigns sent from the platform.

Here’s a breakdown of the new features.

List management

The List area of the Mailer leverages the existing architecture of The HiVE to provide a framework to manage automated lists of Members who have indicated interest in a particular area.

The current automated lists available in the Mailer include:

• Projects - Member ‘followers’ who have subscribed to an individual project.
• Categories - Members who have indicated they are interested in a particular topic of interest via the signup form.
• Location - Members who have indicated they are interested in a particular location of interest via the signup form.
• Newsletter - Members who have indicated they want to receive a sitewide ‘newsletter’ via the signup form.

The Mailer currently only allows users to view the automated lists, but there will soon be the ability to create custom and segmented lists.

Automated campaigns

A number of automated campaigns have been sent from the platform for some time, including when followers are notified of updates and events, or when new projects are published on the site. However users have not had visibility over these in the past.

Automated campaigns can now be seen in the Mailer including the date they were sent (or future scheduled date), a preview of the campaign, and the list of recipients that they were sent to along with other details. Users can also cancel in-progress campaigns if a mistake was made (there is usually a delay before campaigns are sent to allow for this).

Manual campaigns

The Mailer will also allow you to create custom, manual campaigns to communicate with your Members in cases where the automated campaigns are not sufficient. This could be used to send out a newsletter, broadcast important sitewide news, correct errors, etc.

Creating manual campaigns currently only allows rich text to be added to the body of the email, but there will potentially be more options in future releases.

Campaign reporting

One of the best features of the Mailer is the ability to see how your campaigns have performed. Campaigns reports will show the number and percentage of ‘opens’, ‘clicks’ and ‘bounces’ to measure engagement. A more fine grain look at these metrics for each recipient is also available, so you can quickly see if emails were opened or bounced.

Consent management

The Mailer functionality has a set of very powerful functions that can be utilised by users. However, most organisations have obligations under law to ensure they responsibly manage the use of these tools to ensure people aren’t being contacted without their consent.

We have considered ways to manage consent within the Mailer. When a user creates a campaign, they are asked to select a type of campaign which then filters the available list to only include list with the appropriate consent type.

In future releases, further consent management features will be introduced when the ability to create custom lists is introduced.