Hi!
I have been using the newsletter functionality in the shop by creating the newsletter then in the selection tab I assigned the user group Newsletter-Abonnenten and clicked send. I always thought that I got all the users who signed up for newsletters this way.
Today I wanted to export all these users to an Excel sheet, and found out that there is a table named oxnewssubscribed in the database with a lot more entries then there are users in the Newsletter-Abonnenten group. Some of these are marked as unsubscribed, but even without those entries there is a lot more there then in the group. So now I’m confused about whether I was sending newsletters the correct way and also about how to export exactly those users who the shop thinks should be receiving them.
To make it clear my questions are:
- What is the Newsletter-Abonnenten group used for, when is someone added to or removed from it?
- What is the oxnewssubscribed table used for?
Thanks for your reply!
UPDATE:
Supposing that the Newletter-Abonnenten group is not so interesting as the oxnewssubscribed table I tried to assign all user groups to the newsletter. This way I have 1169 recipients (slightly more then if I try to send to the NA group only). But when I select all users in the database who are listed in oxnewssubscribed and aren’t unsubscribed I get 2631 rows. How is this possible, what additional criteria does the shop use?
Hello Adam,
that is most likely explained by the function “use double opt-in” in the settings. That basically means, if a prospect or client registers for the newsletter during the registration, he has to qualify that by clicking on a link in an email for newsletter registration. AFAIK, double opt-in for newsletters is required by German (EU?) law.
Hence it may happen that you might have say 3.000 clients, 2.700 of them registered for the newsletter but never clicked on the link to approve this wish, 1.180 did so and 11 of them unsubscribed again after getting their first e-mail.
That’s why, in oxnewssubscribed, you’ll find a status field with the values 0 - 3. But flog me - I can’t remember what is what but it shall definitely be documented. If you find it out, I’d appreciate if you could drop a line here.
Cheers!
Thanks for the explanation Marco!
I found the column which hold the double optin state: oxdboptin, and seems to have values 1 and 0.
I would make a suggestion to remove the newsletter user group, and also to make the option to send newsletter to all users who subscribed without having to select any groups. Is there some feature request tracker I could submit my suggestions?
users who have completed the double-opt-in after subscribing are automatically members of the group “Newletter-Abonnenten”
the values in column “oxdboptin”:
2 = user subscribed but did not yet confirm the double-opt-in
1 = user confirmed double-opt-in
0 = user did unsubscribe or has never subscribed