Notify customers/members in an OC

I just had a small hub decide not to shift to OFN. They liked everything BUT in their current platform (called FarmMatch) they can click a button which opens an email screen to all their existing members. So I thought it would be a great UX improvement to have this. It could be a button on the OC page - just beside the ‘notify producers’ page. If the OC coordinator clicked it, they would be able to write the text of an email that would automatically go to either (a) all members (in a membership based enterprise) or (b) any consumer who has previously purchased from this enterprise/hub (and has registered as a buyer). So the OC coordinator could use this to communicate with customers at 2 or 3 different points in their process. 1. They could let customers know that the OC is now ready for their orders - and maybe highlight a new supplier or a ‘sale’. (2) They could advise people of changes to product availability within the OC - like: “Garden Party has just offerred 200 pints of organic strawberries”. (3). They could contact customers when the OC is over with an update like, “We have had to make a change to our delivery schedule this week…”. Don’t know who to pin on these UX issues - @sstead @MyriamBoure @lin_d_hop @Kirsten @enricostn @danielle

Would an integration do the job?
UK need this too. So one button to be able to use an external system to contact all your customers.

Mailchimp limit to 2000 subscribers which I think would soon be passed by some hubs. So it would be worth investigating all the options…

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This sounds a lot like a CRM integration issue. Or you could do it by creating an API call.

One of the systems I’m familiar with in the US (markettoharvest.com) has an email newsletter function that automatically sends a newsletter based on the items in the current order cycle and maybe some copy the farmer can use.

As for @lin_d_hop’s point about Mailchimp, are you all familiar with tools like sendgrid and Amazon SES that let you send a much larger numbers of emails for very little or no money?

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i vaguely recall that mandrill does basic email to much greater numbers.

although this could also be something worth looking at odoo for - I’ve not played with its crm

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Why not use mautic and amazon ses it would be very cost effective.

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Check that discussion also Inviting hub members via email
My preference would be to think of a more general messaging in app tool, like a CRM integration yes, for example Odoo is open source and pretty widely used. @enricostn suggested a simple button but for ma can be confusing as the content of the text will differ for every hub, so for me the messaging tool should enable to send a message to customers given specific tags, or all customers, and it would be great for the hub manager to keep track of the messages sent, enable customers to reply, etc.

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I think this is a really interesting feature. In the previous comments we’re mixing 2 things though:

  1. the business logic, WHEN sending the email and to WHO
  2. the email provider, tool or service…

At some extent some tool mentioned above could overlap the 2 things, but we need to focus on what we really need IMHO. Point number 1 can be implemented inside OFN but it will add more complexity to an already complex product IMO. Probably we can think about some kind of external service that talks with OFN (future) API and so on… the problem I see is that this kind of features are really expensive to build and to maintain.

I hope we’ll get soon to a point when we can afford it! :smiley:

This could be done with a Zapier integration similar to this: