Explore newsletter signup options

Simplenews

• This module allows an administrator to create a newsletter entity to which people are able to subscribe.
• Subscriptions are managed with a Drupal block that is placed in a region.
• After a user subscribes, they are sent a confirmation message with a link back to the site. Once they follow those steps, they are then 'subscribed'.
• An administrator then can create a newsletter issue, and assign it to a newsletter. Once the newsletter is ready to send, the administrator can browse to a page and send the message to all those subscribed. Drupal's cron process will then handle sending to all subscribers.

Questions

If we decide to go this route, I think we need to determine the following:

1. What newsletter should be included?
2. What text should the subscription block contain and where should it be placed?
3. What should the confirmation messaging be?
4. What roles should we create to allow the newsletter creation/sending?

Great first steps. Here are my answers, thinking about it from a first-time user perspective:

1. We should create a default newsletter title. Is there a Site Title that we can leverage to do this? Something simple like "[Site Title] Newsletter"
2. "Yes, send occasional emails to me from this site." The block should be placed in the footer region.
3. Confirmation message: "You are successfully subscribed to the [Site Title] Newsletter." Follow up question: Should we include a link to the Unsubscribe page in case someone signed up by mistake?
4. Unsure how to answer this one. A new user likely is not thinking too much about various roles, and they are likely the sole owner/admin of a site. I would keep this ability on the Admin role unless it makes more sense to create a new role (but that feels more complicated than it needs to be)

Thanks for this @pfrilling and @artinruins!

I think we need to do a UX assessment of Simplenews before we proceed, I haven't ever used it myself. My main concern would be that it doesn't quite match the expectation of marketing-focused users, and we may be better off looking to integrate with external tools first.

I think Simplenews makes sense as an initial focus.

However, as Drupal CMS evolves, it would be great to offer options for other solutions, whether they are alternative Drupal solutions (I don't have a specific one in mind), locally hosted options, such as Mautic, or SAAS solutions like Mailchimp.

I would guess a separate recipe would be needed for each option.