Lots of Joomla-powered Websites find themselves building good-sized member lists. One Christian ministry we work with has over 8,000 registered users scattered around the country.  FreeBeerBuddy.com, which lists beer and drink specials all over the United States, has double that number.  You run a Joomla site. You have members. You need to make money off your membership base. You need to reach them and sell them stuff, or promote your advertisers to them so they pay you more money. How can you do that? That is where three components - Event Mail, Community Builder, and Acajoom come in.

When Community Builder 1.2 came out, I was ecstatic. I had several sites that I managed that needed to compile lists of members for different targeted mailings. The new User Lists functionality in CB allowed for boolean searches of any field, which meant that finding users based on interest, location, favorite rock band, etc. would be extremely easy. 

Then the other shoe dropped. The Community Builder User Lists had majorly cool filtering and search capabilities. The only problem was - there was no way to export that data from Community Builder. I could execute a query to get all the members in a single city. But then I couldn't do a damn thing with the data other than browse it. Which meant I could identify a target market among my members, but I couldn't reach it.

CB Juice would allow me to export all my members to a CSV. So I did that for awhile, but that is a complete hassle. The CB User Lists search capabilities were so much better than I could do in Excel at which I suck, so using a spreadsheet was not really a good solution. What I needed for the sites I manage was an easy way to identify a group of members based on some common feature(s), and then export that to a mailing list so that I could send them targeted information.

That is why Event Mail was born. There was no solution on the market to do exactly what I just described, so CorFun created one. So far, we have used Event Mail in two major campaigns. The first was a series of Christian events held around the country as fund raisers. We used the Community Builder User List of the ministry's members to filter by city. We then exported those results to custom Acajoom mailing lists. That let us send a targeted email to members in cities that were having an event. 

What a difference that made in response rate! We didn't have to send out a massive email listing the upcoming dates and asking the members to find the one nearest them. Instead, we sent them a specific email about their nearest event and asked them to come to it. We then kept sending them follow ups as the date got closer. Targeting the mailings to a narrow audience and giving them only the most useful information is the ticket to increased traffic and sales. 

We also used Event Mail to help out building a custom mailing list for a new micro-brew beer that was being launched in the state of Florida. A site we did for a training seminar company is building its whole business model around the ability of Community Builder User Lists to identify prospects, and Event Mail to export those prospects to custom mailing lists based on interests, location, and industry.

Event Mail works with all three versions of Acajoom, including the free one. Why Acajoom? Because we use it ourselves and believe in it. We have sent mailings of upwards of 16,000 subscribers using Acajoom - from shared hosting - and had great success with it as a component. 

The only downside to Acajoom in the past has been its integration with Community Builder. When you create a new Acajoom Mailing List, you have a one-time option to add all of your registered members to that mailing list. I can't tell you how many times I needed to create a mailing list only for people interested in honey beer, or the ancient Church Fathers, or a specific band, or a specific sports team. But Acajoom wouldn't do that for me. It was all members or no members.

Event Mail solves that problem. Build the Acajoom mailing list. Identify the people who need to be on that list using the power of the Community Builder Users List search, then export just the right members to your list. Simple, powerful, effective. And the response rate goes way up. That means more sales, and more money to the bottom line. Scattershot email newsletters and email blasts annoy people. You need an easy, cheap, effective way to send emails to people that relate to what they are interested in. Event Mail gives you that ability, and your bank account will thank you for it.

Targeted mailing lists - with all necessary components running native to Joomla. This is a marketing dream come true. If you have members of your site, and those members give you profile information, then you need Event Mail for targeted communications.

Non-profits that raise money, business associations, bands that go on tour, companies with training seminars, brand-specific marketers - the list of companies that need Event Mail is limitless. We recommend that you give Event Mail a closer look by checking out its store page. Feel free to contact us also with questions about Event Mail, or any of our other Joomla extensions.