Apparently I've spent too much time with the Mandrill service. So much time, that I really love it, but people around me just don't get it. That is why before I introduce to your our new extension, I'll spent few minutes explaining what transactional emails are, why they matter and why Mandrill is so awesome!
So what is a transactional email? Basically it is an email sent to an individual based on an action. It could be:
- an action they took directly
- an action they were the target of
- even an inaction (such as a reminder mail telling your users to log on to your website)
For example - if you register on compojoom.com, first you'll get a mail asking you to confirm your registration. This mail is a transactional email (it was sent due to an action) & it is extremely important that it lands in your inbox. If it doesn't, then you cannot complete the registration process.
Let us hope that you contact us and tell us that you didn't get the confirmation mail. Did you know what I was doing in the past? I was scratching my head and the standard answer was - look at your spam folder. But is the email really in the spam folder, was it actually sent? Is it still in the process of delivery or did it magically disappear from the face of the internet? In the past there was just no simple way to know that, but now that has changed thanks to Mandrill. You can look at the emails being sent from your joomla website, you can look at open/click rates and you can always know if a mail was delivered or if it bounced back. This is what the Mandrill service is all about - giving you the peace of mind that your customers are receiving your emails & the bonus of knowing if they actually open them and engage with the content.
Did I say that the Mandrill service is free for up to 12 000 emails per month? And in the world of transactional emails 12k is gazillioin emails per month....
So now that we know what transactional emails are and why Mandrill is awesome let us look at our new extension CMandrill. What is it going to do for you? Well, as awesome as the Mandrill service is - it is targeted more or less to geeks. And Joomla admins are not geeks (well most of us are not)! With CMandrill -> you just install a joomla extension, configure it by providing the API key, enable the plugin that comes with the extension and suddenly all emails* are going to be send through the Mandrill API. But not only that! The boring plain text emails that your joomla site sends like this one:
can be transformed to this one here:
The short non-comprehensive feature list should look something like this:
- Send emails through the Mandrill API optimized for speed
- Look at the most important stats (send, receive, bounce rates) directly from your Joomla back-end
- Configure a global HTML template for emails
- Create HTML templates for specific components and even further define each view or task that should use that template
Still not convinced that CMandrill is a great extension? Than have a look at the video I made for you!
All right! If you reading those last lines you should be sold! Just go ahead - create a mandrill account (if you haven't done it already) and download the CMandrill extension by clicking this link here:
https://compojoom.com/downloads/official-releases-stable/mandrill-transactional-mails-made-easy
The documentation is over here:
https://compojoom.com/support/documentation/mandrill
If you need support of any kind just write in our forum:
https://compojoom.com/forum/116-mandrill-for-joomla
If you just want to let us know what you think - use comment form bellow!
*emails that are sent through the Joomla API. Extensions that are not using the Joomla API to send emails won't be handled by CMandrill.
