Working with newsletters

Newsletters allow you to send out e-mails to users who agree to receive them by subscribing. The system stores a directory of all newsletter subscribers, which you can monitor and manage. You can also add predefined components to the pages of your website that allow users to manage their newsletter subscriptions directly.

The advantage of newsletters over standard e-mail is that you can give all issues a unified appearance. You can use newsletter templates with shared design elements, such as a company logo or a footer with general information regarding your business. Newsletters can also contain macros to personalize the e-mails according to the data you have in the system about the individual subscribers.

Kentico supports two types of newsletters:

  • Static newsletters - you edit and send every issue manually. The newsletters are based on predefined templates.
  • Dynamic newsletters - issues are sent out to all subscribers automatically at a specified interval. The newsletter dynamically loads the content from a web page, which is usually updated between newsletter issues.

How the system sends newsletters

When the system sends out a newsletter issue, it creates a personalized e-mail for every individual subscriber. The e-mails are placed into a Newsletter queue. The Send queued newsletters scheduled task processes the newsletter queue and sends the e-mails either directly to the SMTP server or to the system’s e-mail queue (depending on the configuration of the given newsletter). The system automatically re-sends any e-mails lost due to errors.

Using the e-mail queue is recommended for newsletters with large amounts of subscribers to ensure that all e-mails are delivered correctly.