Target Mail - Virtuemart, CB, Acajoom Integration

Target Mail does six things that many Virtuemart-powered stores need: 

1. Target Mail integrates Virtuemart and Community Builder!

Your users check out through the regular Virtuemart process. They use the regular Virtuemart form to create a Joomla account, or even choose not to. Either way is no problem. Target Mail can then be used to add your shoppers to the Community Builder tables so that your shoppers are now full site members! This can work for shoppers who register, and for shoppers who don't. The shipping address and email information are transferred from Virtuemart to the user's CB profile automatically!

Look - the primary goal of your site is to sell merchandise. Having a community to support that goal is a great way to do business in the Web 2.0 space. But - Virtuemart/CB integration that forces users to leave the checkout process to register in CB will hurt your bottom line! Target Mail keeps the Virtuemart checkout process intact, and let's you add users to Community Builder, and add their shopper data, in a way that won't cost you sales or complicate your site!

The addition of VM shoppers to Community Builder can be done manually, or it can be done using a CRON job which will update Community Builder automatically every time the CRON job runs!

2. Target Mail lets users update their shopper information in Community Builder.

Target Mail adds your Virtuemart shoppers to Community Builder. That is great, but what is even better is that Target Mail lets your community members manage their shipping information from their Community Builder profiles! All they have to do is log in, edit the Community Builder profile, and the changes to address, email address, phone, etc. are automatically transferred to their Virtuemart Profile. One place to manage all their important information!

3. Target Mail lets you make all site members in Community Builder into Shoppers!

If you have a site that allows membership, and you would like to make the members into shoppers so that their shipping/billing information is already waiting for them at first purchase - Target Mail will take care of that for you! Target Mail can find members in CB that don't have Shopper Profiles in Viruemart and then add them along with Billing/Shipping information.

4. Target Mail stores users purchases on their Community Builder (CB) profiles.

You look at your list of members in your Community Builder userlist. Wouldn't it be great to know who purchased what? Target Mail automatically adds the Product ID of each product purchased to a special field on the Community Builder profile. That allows you to search for products in the CB Userlist and get information as to who purchased what products. Correlate that information with location, interests, or any other information your members have provided on their profiles.

5. Target Mail lets you create custom mailing lists.

You have a new product coming out. You would like to send an email to all your shoppers that have purchased similar products in the past. Okay - how do you do that using Virtuemart?

Trick question - the answer is you buy Target Mail from CorFun! Using Target Mail, you export your shoppers to Community Builder as members. Community Builder has excellent search functionality built into its UserLists. You use the UserList functionality to identify shoppers/members that have bought the products you are interested in. Target Mail lets you export that list of names to an Acajoom Mailing List. (Works with Acajoom News, Plus, and Pro and jNews). You can then send targeted mailings to shoppers who are interested in this kind of merchandise.

Imagine being able to narrow prospect lists down by interests, prior purchasing behavior, location, age, or any other demographic. Stop fishing for business and start targeting your shoppers! Using Target Mail, you can create targeted mailings that will increase your profits and make you the envy of online shopkeepers everywhere.

6. Export Lists of Users for other applications.

Target Mail creates an exportable file based on any CB UserList that you choose. This file can be used as input into other applications, or imported to a spreadsheet, or for many other purposes.

For more information, watch the demo videos!

To give Target Mail a try, you can visit our Demo Page for complete instructions on how to demo the Target Mail system!

To purchase, just add the software to your shopping cart by pressing the button below and proceed through checkout. After your purchase is confirmed, a download link and ID will be emailed to you so that you can get your new software!

Questions about this software and what it can do for you? Then email us today using the product information request form.

Target Mail can be used to perform manual updates, or it can be used to run automatic updates using a CRON job set up on your server. The following information illustrates how Target Mail works in a production store using Virtuemart to check out.

NOTE: There are many other ways to use Target Mail. The Use Case below is just an example.

1) Shopper finds what he/she is looking for in your online store. The shopper then goes through normal Virtuemart checkout and optional account create. Unlike other Community Builder and Virtuemart integrations, Target Mail does not try to make the user go through Community Builder's account registration. This is critical! The shopper has decided to pay you money for one or more products. You do not want to complicate this process.

2) After the shopper has checked out, he/she is now part of the Joomla User Table, but not part of CB. If he/she tries to access the CB profile, up comes the dreaded "not activated" message. The situation is even worse if you have an 'optional' account create. The user may not have even created an account, so may not be a member of your site at all.

3) One of the site admins logs into the system and runs the Target Mail system (as shown in the demo video), or you have a CRON set up to do the updates on a regular basis. On sites we manage, we typically do this once a day via a CRON job. The Target Mail system decides how to update the CB tables. Here are the updates performed on a shopper by shopper basis:

• If the shopper is already in Community Builder, Target Mail will update his purchase info with the product IDs just purchased. This will allow up-to-date purchase information on the CB Profile.
• If the shopper is in the Joomla User table (but not in CB), the Joomla User Information (username, password, email address) is added to the CB tables and the Virtuemart information (address, city, state, zip, products purchased, etc.) is also added to the new CB user profile. Adding an account to Joomla via Virtuemart Registration does not add it to CB. Without Target Mail you must add new users to the CB tables manually, or they will exist only in the Joomla users table.
• If the shopper is not in the CB Tables, or the Joomla User Tables, Target Mail will create an account for them. For users built in CB using this method, the username defaults to the email address used to process the order in VirtueMart. The password is always the word ‘temppass.’ Both of these fields can be updated by the user after logging into the Joomla system by editing the CB profile. This allows Target Mail to be used on sites where Virtuemart is set to either ‘optional’ account create or ‘no account create.’ The shoppers who buy something in the store can automatically be set up as a site members.

Users created by Target Mail are set to fully enabled status. They can log in immediately.

A CRON job can automate this process! CorFun provides a sample CRON and instructions how to set up your CRON so that all of the above processes happen automatically on a regular schedule!

4) Now that users are in CB as well as Virtuemart, they can use their normal CB profiles to control their shipping adresses, contact info, etc. for Virtuemart. No need to update in both places. Changes to the Community Builder Profile are automatically pushed to the Virtuemart Shopper Information.

5) Admins can use the power of the CB Userlists to periodically create targeted mailing lists by location, products purchased, sex, age, or any other information on the CB User profile. Since CB Userlists supported really complex, advanced search functions this gives a tremendous amount of power for communicating with your members/customers. Mailing lists are exported to Acajoom or Jnews, which is the best newsletter component for Joomla.

6) You can also go back the other way. Users in CB which are not in Virtuemart can be added to Virtuemart as shoppers. If you installed your Virtuemart shop into an active site with Community Builder, then this process can migrate all of your user information such as name, address, etc. to Virtuemart.

From the Joomla Extensions Directory.

Tried this for CB - VM integration

byIMspintheweb on February 18, 2011