EETemplates

Module Review: Boomerang

Boomerang is a new add-on from the folks at SmoothFunction. And before we dive in I will tell you this is pretty damn exciting. I’ll explain later. For now they have set the price to $95 USD per license.

From their website we see that it can:

• Create and send full HTML, text, and multi-type emails, taking advantage of the optional WYSIWYG editor if desired.
• Create, save and reuse email templates.
• See reports with up to the second stats and graphs on your email campaigns, including opens and open rates, unopens and unopened rates, clicks and click rates, click rates on opens, opens over time, the all important unsubscribes,
• You can schedule your emails for future dates and times
• Integrates with ExpressionEngine’s existing Mailing List module, allowing you to start emailing right away without the need to import your subscribers.
• View and optionally resend any or all past emails.

Reading this list of functionality it is quite apparent that they have spent a LOT of time on this.

So that is what they tell us it can do.

But how well does it do it? Let’s start at the beginning…

Well purchasing from their site is easy. Just register and walk through the process to use paypal to purchase the add-on. Once you have paid then you should be able to go back to the site, log in and click on the My Account link to see the items that you have purchased. This is very familiar as it is the same process that we use. They have made Boomerang in such a way that you need a license to use it. So on the page that opens when you click on my account you will see the following (only your license key will be filled in):

 

But one of the items on the lacking side of things is documentation. Step by step instructions for the newbies are not really included. I am betting that SmoothFunction is targeting the EE Dev crowd instead of the EE Newbies.

So.. Here are some step by step instructions for installing Boomerang

From your My Account page you download the package and unzip it. There are two folders inside of the main Boomerang folder. The first is an images folder that has a single GIF image in it that is used for tracking upload this to the images directory in your hosting. The second is the module and language files that go inside of your system folder. Upload those into their respective folders.

Once you have uploaded all of the necessary files the actual installation is as easy as any other module. You log into your Control Panel for ExpressionEngine, click on the modules tab, and click on the install link next to the Boomerang entry. Next you need to configure the module by entering in the email address that you want the emails to be from, a reply email address, the name you want the email address to be from and the license key.

 

Once all this is completed you still have one last bit of information that you need to configure. If you intend on taking advantage of the scheduling options with Boomerang then you will need to set up a cron job that checks to see when a scheduled event is supposed to take place and executes it. I will admit to being a cron job newbie so for those of you that are also unsure of how to do that here are some steps to help those of you using CPanel.

On the Settings Page you will see a table that looks like so:

 

First you need to highlight the line that starts with /usr/bin/php -f and copy it. Next open up your Cpanel installation. You are going to scroll to the bottom and find the Cron Jobs icon. In our installation it was the 5th one from the left.

 

Click on it. You should see something like:

 

From here… since I am a newbie and anything with the words Unix Style scare me I selected Standard. I chose wisely.

 

Just make sure to paste the line that we copied into the Command to Run texbox. I chose to run mine every other minute and set all the other parameters to every day, every hour etc. Also notice that at the top of the page there is a textbox for where to send the cron output. I originally had a legit email address in here but it was sending me stupid messages that I did not necessarily need so I just entered in a dummy. I would suggest that if you are initially setting up the cron job or are testing it cause you are having issues then you may want a legit email address in there. But if it is not necessary then you may want to save yourself from the mass of emails it creates.

From there you should be set up. Boomerang should be configured and is ready to go.

You say you want Fancy Smacy? Or simple and easy?

The first decision you need to make is whether you want to use some fancy smancy HTML template or if you want to do a mostly text template with HTML for things like links and stuff but keeping the formatting to a min. It’s just an opinion but for our purposes something super fancy is overkill. I want access to HTML because I want to be able to direct people to articles or products but when you start to get fancy then you have to take into consideration all of the different email apps there are and testing in all of them… if you thought fixing items in IE was a pain you aint never felt a pain like trying to test in Yahoo, Hotmail, Gmail, Apple Mail, Entourage, Outlook (2000-current) and on and on. It is ridiculous. So suffice it to say the simpler the better. I have better things to do with my time than fight all those systems. For those of you that want to go that route though Campaign Monitor (our favorite non-Boomerang email newsletter sender) has a bunch that you can download for free.

Open says me…

So when you open up Boomerang to send an email you see the following:

 

From here the instructions should be self explanatory. We had no issue in creating an email and sending it to our test mailing list.

The good and the bad…

I talked with Jack McDade and he said that Version 1.1 will provide the ability to use ExpressionEngine tags in the mailings. Which to me is where the exciting things start happening. We are currently working with a Church client and I could see them sending out a weekly ‘what’s going on’ type email where the email is set up to automatically pull events from the Calendar and display them so the recipients know what is happening at the church that week. But it could also be used to auto generate an email using the entries from the blog, product list or whatever…

Batch subscribing people is so easy in ExpressionEngine. Basically you create a new mailing list or use an existing one, paste the emails into the provided textarea and select which list you want them to go to. Crazy easy. And since Boomerang uses the default Mailing List Module interface for this it makes it easy in Boomerang too!

 

SmoothFunction really thought out the process. If you need one bringing in a WYSIWYG is as easy as pushing a button. Makes editing the email content a whole lot easier. Especially for nonHTML knowledgeable clients. They can push the button and start editing the content easy!

 

One of the complaints I have regarding UI is that when you go to schedule the email to be sent it is not clear what to do if you want it sent now. I wish there was a now button on this page as well as a schedule button… Currently it is not apparent that if you click the send button it will bypass the date fields and sends the email immediately. Small item but a two button system would make it clearer. See..

 

A big no no that Jack said they are going to try and fix for 1.1 is that if you create an email newsletter and schedule it but you find an error and need to edit it before it goes out there are no options for getting it back. Once you click on that final send button it is going… going… going… gone…. Hope you don’t make any mistakes…

Two other items that are a limitation is the lack of throttling and the lack of bounce management. These will be issues for larger clients as they can quickly get you listed as a spammer. Throttling is the act of metering out the emails sent over a period of time. So if you have 200 emails being sent it may only send 25 per 30 minutes so as to not hose your server or make your host think something is up. Bounce management is important because if someone submits an email that is bogus and you hit a providers over and over again well… you will find yourself on the black list again… Hopefully these features will be added to the 1.1 release as well.

Just as a heads up the unsubscribe tag is not meant to work on the Quick Send emails. The tag inserts the text but it is not a link like with the normal emails. In talking to Jack he said that the reason for this is that every link that is generated for the unsubscribe link it unique and they did not want to waste them on test emails.

what say thee…

All in all I think it is an awesome and very exciting system. There are a few issues but some of them have work-arounds. One thing that I feel really needs to be addressed is the lack of the ability to stop or edit emails that you schedule. But I am really really looking forward to the functionality available with the 1.1 release. I think for mailing lists under the 10k mark this product is really stable and useful. If they build in throttling then there will never be a reason to pay for icontact, constant contact or the others again… And we can start to build really useful automated email newsletters that update based on the changing content. pretty damn cool if you ask me.

For additional information you can see the official thread in the ExpressionEngine forums

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