Getting Subscribed

The other feature is the newsletter subscription mechanism, which is available to both registered customers and occasional visitors.

There are two ways to subscribe to the newsletters. The simpler way to subscribe to the store's newsletters is to by typing an e-mail address into the 'Your e-mail' field in the 'News' box and clicking on the 'Subscribe' button underneath it (Figures 15, 16). This way you send a request to get subscribed to all available newsletters for which the 'Active' and 'Show in news' parameters are set to 'Yes'. After submitting a subscription request, you will receive a subscription confirmation e-mail message. The message contains subscription details and a URL he has to visit in order to complete the subscription. The user's e-mail is not added to the subscription list until he confirms the subscription by accessing that URL. After the subscription is confirmed, the user receives a subscription notification for each newsletter to which he has subscribed.

Information on how to unsubscribe from the newsletters is also included in the subscription notification message, as well as in every newsletter message. If a subscriber decides to be removed from the list, all he has to do is visit the unsubscription URL provided there. He then receives an unsubscription confirmation e-mail message for each newsletter to which he had been subscribed.

Registered customers can subscribe to all active newsletters, whether they are available in the 'News' box or not, and can manage their newsletter subscriptions more efficiently via their customer profiles. To access the newsletter subscription settings, log into the store, switch to 'Your account' tab and click on the 'Modify profile' button. Customer profile has several groups of settings, one of them is the 'Newsletters' group which lists all active newsletters (Figure 19).

Figure 19: Managing newsletter subscriptions through the customer profile

Checkmarks in the boxes corresponding to newsletter titles show which newsletters you are currently subscribed to. Place checkmarks next to the newsletters you want to subscribe to and remove them from those for which you want to cancel the subscription, and then click on the 'Submit' button to save your new settings. No subscription confirmations are necessary. The subscription/unsubscription notifications are sent to the e-mail specified in the profile.