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Building a better campaigns module
We are big users of campaigns and use it in a few different ways. If you just want to blast out suff to your client, SugarCRM campaigns work fine. However if you want to do more valuable marketing campaigns and target lists need to be improve.
In our case we use email marketing to drive our events. Our processes is quite simple. We create a list of people to promote to, send them an email and let them register on-line using a modified WebToLead form that creates a contact for each person on the form and puts these contacts on a registration target list. After a few days we send out reminders to those people that have not responded (i.e., registered or opted-out)
Largely this works very well however there are some additions/changes I'd really like to see to streamline and fully automate this:
1. Domain based supression Today I can only have a single domain on the domain suppression list. Why can't I have a list of domains like I have a list of email addresses? This is a more obvious/consistent way to implement domain based suppression. I've patched EmailDelivery.php to make this work. It took me about 15 min and is very simple. This has been proposed in bugs and the deltas provided. Happy to follow this up with somebody and provide code.
2. WebToRegistration form. I use a web form to add Leads to a specific target list. I've implemented this based on WebToLead and it is simple to do. However it would be nice to have this out of the box. In many ways it is the same as allowing people to subscribe to a target list. Happy to follow this up with somebody and provide code.
3. Suppress before queuing. The current approach to suppression can be confusing to novices and is make understanding the impact of suppression unnecessarily complex. That is, when I send out an email an item is queued for each contact on the target list and suppression is done is done much later when the job is run. So if I look at the queue I see a long list of emails which is not a true reflection of who will be contacted as some of these will be suppressed. This is confusing. If Sugar did suppression first, then the queue would only have the items that really will get sent out which immediately reinforces understanding of suppression
Target lists also need to be beefed up. Unfortunately Target lists are not treated as first objects like most other items in Sugar. e.g.,
1. A target list can't be accessed in reports. For example I'd like to have reports that selects a campaign, then shows all the contacts on all target lists attached to that campaign. I might select or filter out target lists based on the type or name. Alteratively, I might want to have a report that is based on target list as the primary module.
2. Target lists can't have triggers. I'd really like to be able to create an alert when a contact is added to a target list.
3. Target can't be used in the Module Builder. I'd like to be able to create a new module and have a specific target list associated with an item., i.e., one-to-one relationship, however this is not possible.
So why do I need all this? For our event processes I want to:
1. Create reports that show who is on the invitation list or who has registered, i.e., report from a Target List.
I want to automate the registration process from the email using self service, i.e., send out an email with a link to a WebRegistration form.
2. I want to send reminders only to people who have not registered. Using the registration Target List as an email suppression list almost does what we want. However it is possible that the person getting the mail may register others from their company, so we want to suppress reminders based on domain suppression.
3. Since we use a lot of suppression, when I queue a job I want to see an accurate list of who is going to get the email before the job is executed (often in the early morning).
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Originally Posted by adam.frank 
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