Sending personalized messages with Views Send

Simplenews is a great module and a lot of Drupal sites use it to send mass mailing to users or subscribers. However, IMO this module has some per-design limitations:

1. The messages cannot be personalized based on the recipient data. You cannot insert formulas like "Dear [first-name] [last-name]" or "Your account balance is $[amount]".
2. It doesn't accept other kind of data as recipient list. Subscriptions are basically stored as a list of E-mail addresses in a specific table. For example you cannot use nodes as recipient list.
3. While subscribers list is a simple E-mail addresses list, you cannot perform advanced filtering on recipients data in order to target very fine subsets of subscribers.

A tentative to address the above issues was made by Views Mail module. I tested that module but, after several attempts, I discovered a number of limitations that make it not fully meet my needs. Here are some of them: Views Send vs. Views Mail.

Here comes Views Send! Views Send allow sending mass mailing using Views Bulk Operations.

It is very simple now to build very fine tuned lists of recipients using the power and flexibility of Views module and then send targeted messages by simply selecting the column that acts as E-mail address. And yes... now you can select additional fields in Views and inject the fields values in the message body or subject as tokens. As long as is based on Views, you can take advantage of using Exposed Filters in order to increase the user experience when building the mass mailing target.

Moreover, after filtering the list with Views, you may want to select manually specific recipients using checkboxes provided by Views Bulk Operations (VBO).

Amazing! Isn't it?

How it works?

1. Create a view and add at least one column containing E-mail addresses.
2. [Optional] Expose Views filters to let the user easily build list of recipients using UI.
3. Create a "Page" display and set the Style to "Bulk Operations".
4. On "Bulk Operations" Style configuration, under "Selected operations", select Send mass mail (views_send_mail_action).
5. Save the view, load the page, use exposed filters to build the list, select all or some rows and choose "Send mass mail".
6. Fill the message form to configure the E-mail. Use tokens to personalize your E-mail. The module provide also row-based tokens, taken from the current row of the view. For example, if the view has a column with the key users_name (the user name) you can use this replacement token [views-send-users_name].
7. Preview and send the message.

Note: The messages will be queued in a spool table and will be delivered only on cron. You can control how many messages will be send per cron run.

Dependencies

• Views Bulk Operations

Similar modules

You may want to try also:

• Views Mail. See what's different: Views Send vs. Views Mail.
• Simplenews

Some pieces of code were inspired by Simplenews module.

Maintainers & Sponsors

• Module author & maintainer: Claudiu Cristea.
• Maintainers: Antonio De Marco, Ezra Barnett Gildesgame.
• This module is sponsored by Webikon.