Better Email Marketing in AEM using MailChimp

Email Marketing is directly marketing a commercial message to group of people using email. It can be used to send ads, request business or brand/product awareness, building customer loyalty, acquiring new customers or convince existing customer and increased sales.

Currently in AEM, email marketing can be done through the newsletter. Now, let’s consider a real world scenario. Let’s take an example of any eCommerce website say Flipkart or Myntra where we have users in billions. Now, either of their marketing authors has to send the newsletter for promotions to their users. Imagine the load on AEM server and performance implication. Definitely, the performance will degrade because of the following two reasons:

1.  As the number of user increases, managing those leads/users become more difficult.
2.  Overhead of sending the mails to large number of audience.

To mitigate the performance issue arising due to above mentioned factors, why not integrate a third party marketing service provider that can easily handle the load of managing and sending the mails to large number of audience ?

Although there are many solution available today in the digital market such as Exact Target, etc., we decide to rely on one of the most popular Email Marketing service Provider MailChimp because of its flexible APIs and its features.

Now we can modify the existing flow as follows:

 1. List Creation: Creation of list can be managed on the MailChimp as this would be an organizational decision to agree upon the list and can be imported in the AEM via Polling Importer.

2. Lead Creation:  We would be managing the leads (i.e., users that subscribes to list) on the MailChimp. Thus, AEM will get rid of managing those large number of users. Thus, we overcome one of the factors (i.e. managing large number of users) concerning performance degradation in AEM. 🙂  !!

3. Campaign/Newsletter Creation: This can be managed on the AEM and the marketing author can author the content of campaign/newsletter as per their requirement.

4. Exporting the Campaign/Newsletter to MailChimp:  This event would be triggered from AEM resulting in the creation of newsletter/campaign in mailchimp server. The reason for this additional step is because MailChimp requires campaign/newsletter to be present on their server in order to send to the various leads.

5. Send the Newsletter:  This step would be triggered by marketing author through AEM but the mail will be sent by MailChimp. So finally, we overcome the overhead of sending mail from AEM server which may degrade the performance of AEM 🙂 !!

Detailed Explanation of MailChimp Integration with AEM:
http://www.slideshare.net/JatinGupta39/mail-chimp-integration-with-aem-63774580 by Jatin Gupta

Source Code:  https://github.com/jatingupta01/mailchimp