Moosend is a SaaS all-in-one email marketing tool that not only provides email marketing features but also advanced marketing automation, reporting, landing pages, tracking, newsletters, and subscription forms.

We can think about Moosend as the SaaS version of Sitecore’s Email Experience Manager (EXM) platform.

As this is one of the latest Sitecore acquisitions, in this post I’ll do a quick overview and first steps to get up to speed with it.

Moosend’s main features include:

• API First Integration
• Personalization, Segmentation and A/B Testing
• Marketing Automation
• Analytics and Reporting
• Third Parties Integration
• Landing Pages, Emails and Forms deigner with predefined templates

Dashboard

This is how the Moosend dashboard looks like:

First Steps

A cool thing about Moosend is that it allows you to create a free account, with already a lot of features to test. So, let’s go and create our first account.

Setting up the sender

Before starting to play with Moosend, we have to get our sender configured, for doing that, we go to the settings -> senders option and then “Add new sender”. We give a name (that will be used as the sender name while sending emails) and an email account.

The next step is to setup the DNS records (DKIM and SPF).

You would need to ask your IT department if you’re setting up your enterprise email account, for this demo I’m just setting up my personal server so I’ve access rights to do it myself.

If everything went good, then you should be able to verify the DNS records and get ready to start sending emails.

Configure your website

In order to enable the Moosend’s tracker on your website, go to settings -> websites -> Add website.

Enter the domain, and then you have several options to connect with it.

A website ID will be created, then you will have some connectors to use or just go with the custom installation that is quite a simple HTML code to be added to the head section of your layout.

After adding this snippet, your website can start making use of the tracker, meaning you can start easily sending events from the front end, for example for tracking, to trigger automation, or to subscribe a user to a mailing list.

Moosend gives two different approaches to facilitate the integration with your website, as I explained above, through the tracker or through calls to the API.

Let’s first have a quick look at the tracker.

You can identify the user by using the following event:

mootrack(‘identify’, ‘my.email@server.com’)

Then we can start, for example, to send a custom event that I will be using for triggering an automation.

Note: Moosend provides some examples on the website integration section: settings -> Websites -> MySite -> Action Tracking Configuration Examples.

Now, we are ready to play with some custom events, let’s go and see this in action by sending a “MyTestingAction” custom event to Moosend tracker, adding it for example, to a button on our site.

mootrack(‘MyTestingAction’);

Automation

Let’s now go to the Automations tab and create a new automation. You will see that Moosend provides a lot of different OOTB templates, but for this example, I’m just choosing the “Custom automation” option.

The Automations editor is really straightforward and easy to use.

Click on “Select your trigger” and you will see the different options, I selected for this case “When custom event is recorded”.

Then we select the options and we choose the event that we previously defined (MyTestingAction). Bear in mind that for the event to appear in the dropdown has to be fired at least once.

Then we add an action, in this case, I’m adding the user (email) to a mailing list (subscribe).

We can now add the action, I’ll be choosing the”Then subscribe to list” option, for the demo I’ve also created a Mailing List (“My Testing List”), and finally, you can choose to add him as verified or not.

Now the automation is ready, we can enable it and see it in action. The interface is really easy to use and the options are huge.

We check now that after triggering the custom event, the user is being added to the mailing list.

In the next post, I’ll explain how to create a campaign, a quick overview of the editor and the OOTB templates. We will be then adding an extra automation step to send an email to the user subscribed in the previous step. Also, I’ll be focusing and doing the demo with the API approach, I hope you find this interesting, and keep tuned for more Moosend related posts!