How to Integrate SendStudio into ArticleLive

By Eddie Machaalani

Introduction

One of the great new features in ArticleLive is the ability to integrate SendStudio (our email marketing software) directly into your web site. By doing this, the details of anyone who fills out the newsletter box on your site go straight into one of your SendStudio mailing lists. You can then send them your newsletter, promotions, or even automatic follow up emails using SendStudio's autoresponder feature. Let me show you how easy it is to integrate the two.

Setting Up SendStudio

Firstly, you need to install both ArticleLive and SendStudio on the same web site. Because ArticleLive references SendStudio's PHP code directly, they must be on the same web site. The installation is quick and easy - upload the files, run the web-based installation wizards and you're done.

Next you need to create a mailing list in SendStudio where you want your newsletter subscriber's details to be saved. To do this, just choose the Create a Mailing List under the Campaigns menu. You can then fill in the details to create a new mailing list:



Click Save and your mailing list is ready to go. The next step is optional, but it's recommended. We're going to create a new custom field to store the first name of our subscribers. By doing this, when it comes time to send emails, we can personalize the subject line and/or body of the email with their first name.

Click the View Custom Fields option under the Mailing Lists menu and the click the Create a Custom Field... button. Type in First Name for the name of the custom field and click Next:



When the page loads, just click Next again. We now need to assign the custom field to our mailing list, so tick the checkbox next to the mailing list you created earlier and click Save:


We've now done the preliminary work in SendStudio. Let's now tell ArticleLive about SendStudio.

Integrating SendStudio Into ArticleLive

To start, go to your ArticleLive control panel in the browser. Login and click the Settings link at the top right of the page. Now click the SendStudio tab and you'll see the SendStudio integration options:


Tick the Yes, enable SendStudio on my web site checkbox and you'll see more options which allow you to tell ArticleLive where SendStudio is installed:


There are three fields you need to fill in:

1. The path to where SendStudio is installed on your web site. The path is relative to the home directory of your web site. So for example, if you have SendStudio installed at www.yoursite.com/sendstudio, then you would type /sendstudio into the SendStudio Path field.
2. The username you use to login to SendStudio
   
3. The password you use to login to SendStudio

Once you've typed in these details, click Save. More options will appear that allow you to choose which mailing list you want your subscriber's details to be saved to:


As you can see, I've selected the mailing list I created earlier. I've also chosen the First Name custom field I created earlier. This is where the first name of anyone who subscribers to my newsletter will be saved in SendStudio. Finally, I choose a thank you page. This is the page someone will be shown after they've subscribed to my newsletter. In this case I choose ArticleLive's built-in thank you page, but you could easily create your own from the Web Pages -> Create a Web Page menu option.

We've now integrated SendStudio into our ArticleLive web site, so let's give it a test.

Testing the Integration

To test the integration of SendStudio into ArticleLive, we can start by filling out the newsletter box on our ArticleLive web site:



Then we can login to our copy of SendStudio and see that the subscriber's detailed have been saved to our mailing list:



If you click Edit next to the new subscriber's details, you can see his first name has also been saved into the custom field we created earlier:


Now that all of our ArticleLive newsletter subscribers are added to our SendStudio mailing list automatically, we can send them our newsletter, promotions emails, or even autoresponders. The possibilities are endless.