Guide to Getting Started

Step 1: Get to know MailBeez

From within your store’s admin interface you will now have a new Mailbeez link – simply click here to access your MailBeez interface and take a few moments to browse around. Within this area you will see a number of tabs which group common functionality and settings. For now, keep the default configuration settings as they can easily be changed later. Just remember that if you need any configuration help, you can always visit the online documentation by clicking on “Documentation available (view Online)”

By default MailBeez is placed in Simulation Mode, which is indicated by the word “Mode: simulate” in several locations in the User Interface:

Toggle between simulation and production mode

With the default ‘Simulate’ mode activated, you can really play around with MailBeez and learn what you can edit, touch, change and browse, without worrying that your customers will receive any emails.

Step 2: Test MailBeez

MailBeez offers a very safe and intuitive testing system which allows you to:

1. View the email templates
2. Send a test email to a preferred email address
3. Run MailBeez Modules in Simulation mode

View the email templates

With the buttons “View mail (html)” and “View mail (txt)” you can preview the static text and style of the mail templates.

Preview the templates

You will notice that placeholder content like ‘{$firstname}’ for example, is not processed, but instead shows you where dynamic data will be inserted in the final email.

Mailbeez email templates are 100% template based, and therefore can be customized without any programming whatsoever. As long as you are comfortable with a little css editing, you will be able to create or make amendments to a Mailbeez template.

Template files are structured like this:

Main-Templates – common for all modules (if not configured differently) :

(shop-root)/mailhive/common/templates/email_html.tpl (html version)

(shop-root)/mailhive/common/templates/email_txt.tpl (txt version)

Sub-Templates – individual for each modules

(shop-root)/mailhive/mailbeez/(module)/email/subject.tpl

(shop-root)/mailhive/mailbeez/(module)/email/body_html.tpl (html version)

(shop-root)/mailhive/mailbeez/(module)/email/body_txt.tpl (txt version)

Try to make some changes to the .tpl file and watch how these changes reflect in the preview.

For ZenCart users, content generated by MailBeez is merged into the Zen Cart Email template System, so the common MailBeez Main-Template is kept very simple.

Find ZenCart’s Email Template on:

(shop-root)/emails/email_template_default.html

Send a test email

This function allows you to send a quick test email to a preferred email address. It’s a great feature for checking layout, text and style changes in your email as you work on a template.

Send a Test-Email

By clicking on the send button you will be able to define the recipient email address.

Run the MailBeez Module in Simulation mode

When you are confident and happy with checking the email templates and sending test emails, the next step is to run a simulation.

What does “Mode: simulate” mean?

In simulation mode, MailBeez will generate emails just like production mode, but will send the emails only to your configured “Send copy to” email address. This email address can be configured in the “MailHive – Basic Configuration” area.

When you run a simulation, you will see exactly what your customers will see, without actually sending them anything; smart, hey?

Prepare data for running a simulation

To run a successful simulation you need to make sure you have customers matching the modules’ criteria. For example, for the “Winback” module, you would need to have a list of customers who have not ordered within a given time frame.

List recipients

When you later put MailBeez in “Mode: production” it will be these same customers who will receive a personalized email.

Running a simulation:

To run a simulation click on this button:

Run the selected module

A pop up will appear and ask for you to confirm the simulation.

Step 3: Keep Mailbeez healthy

From the Mailbeez dashboard in your store admin, you can find the built in Update & Version Check of MailBeez. By clicking on “Check for Update” your installation is checked:

Integrated Version and Update Check

You will also see indicators on the tabs which alert you to updates for your modules, or to newly released modules that you may wish to browse and install. Indeed, once you are confident with Mailbeez, you can start to browse at MailBeez.com for a number of ready made MailBeez modules that can further extend the reach and scope of your email marketing.

Indicators in Tabs

Stores without the installed “cUrl” extension that powers the rather nice Update & Version Check pop up, will instead see a new browser window:

Update Check in Pop-up

From this window you can directly go to the documentation for each additional MailBeez module.

Install additional Modules

When downloading / purchasing a Mailbeez module you will receive a zip archive containing all required files and information about how to install the module.

The installation of additional modules is in most cases (if not stated differently) done by copying a couple of files into your FTP.

Taking the “review_facebook” module as an example (which asks your customers to share their review(s) on Facebook), this has the common MailBeez Module structure:

Copy both the php-file and the folder into your MailBeez-Module folder:

(shop-root)/mailhive/mailbeez/

The new module will now automatically appear in your MailBeez admin front-end (after reload), and can be installed by clicking on the install button.

Step 4: Customize your Emails

Each MailBeez module comes with a set of template files which are used to generate the email in both HTML and TXT formats.

You can customize these template to your needs by modifying these files:

(shop-root)/mailhive/(module)/email/subject.tpl

(shop-root)/mailhive/(module)/email/body_html.tpl (html version)

(shop-root)/mailhive/(module)/email/body_txt.tpl (txt version)

It should be self explanatory, since it is simple editing of html code.

Remember that the content of these template files are merged into the Mail Template file which is common for all modules (if not configured differently) :

(shop-root)/mailhive/common/templates/email_html.tpl (html version)

(shop-root)/mailhive/common/templates/email_txt.tpl (txt version)

You can check your changes by using the “View Mail” and “Send Test Email” functionality as described in Step 2.

Step 5: Activate production mode

So far you learned how to install and test MailBeez modules in simulation mode, and consequently have been able to check any functionality without sending any emails to your customers. However, when you are satisfied and confident with the results, you will be ready to activate production mode and send your first automatically generated trigger email campaigns!

Go to the “MailHive – Basic Configuration” Module, edit the configuration settings and set Mode to “production”:

After saving your settings, you will see the status as “Mode: production”, indicating that the next time you run a MailBeez module it will send out “real” emails to your customers and track sending. To avoid duplication, once you have run a MailBeez module, it will of course not send new emails until there are “new” customers caught by the module’s query – which might be the next day or later depending on the module and size of your customer base.

To understand what MailBeez is sending out to your customers, it is possible to let the system send you a copy of that email. This feature is controlled by the configuration setting “Send copy”:

You can also configure how many copy emails you would like to receive per module. Let’s say that the Birthday module is sending out 100 Birthday greetings, then you could choose to receive a copy of the first 10 emails for example.

Once you believe that MailBeez is doing what it should do, you can set “Send copy” to “False”.

Step 6: Run MailBeez automatically

MailBeez can be set to run by daily processing of each MailBeez module manually – which might become quite time consuming. Therefore it is much better to set up a cronjob to activate Mailbeez each day, allowing you to truly ‘fit and forget’ Mailbeez once it is installed.

If you don’t want to spend hours learning how to set up a “Cronjob”, then the MailBeez Module “Run MailBeez automatically” is perhaps the ideal solution for most stores to automate MailBeez.

To get started, first download the module, follow the easy installation instructions and set “time between running MailBeez (hours)” to “12″. Now your MailBeez will be processed twice a day, catching the optimum amount of customers for each active module!

The Beez-O-Graph

Finally, don’t forget to check your Beez-O-Graph in the Mailbeez dashboard! This fun widget will show you how many emails are being sent out to your customers each day through an intuitive display that keeps you informed as to what Mailbeez is up to.