Newsletter & email campaigns: segments, automations and tracking - Module PrestaShop

Send your newsletter from PrestaShop, without an external platform

PrestaShop's native Newsletter module keeps a list of addresses, but it does not compose a campaign, segment customers or run an automated series. To go further, many shops export their contacts to an emailing platform, pay a subscription that grows with the number of contacts and add a synchronisation to watch. Consent itself often amounts to a checkbox nobody can trace back to the exact wording.

Newsletter & email campaigns brings that work back into the back office: subscribers and consents, segments, a campaign editor, a sending queue, automated journeys, open, click and sales tracking, and deliverability diagnostics. Emails leave through the transport already configured in PrestaShop (Advanced Parameters > E-mail); an authenticated SMTP server is recommended. No third-party account, no API key, no synchronisation: contacts, consent evidence and statistics stay in your shop's database.

The module prepares and sends; you keep the decision. A checklist flags what would block a send, recipients are frozen when sending starts, and a send in progress can be paused, resumed or cancelled.

Subscribers and documented consent

You can reuse the list already in PrestaShop — Newsletter block subscribers, customers who ticked the box in their account, and customers who accepted partner offers only when you explicitly ask for them — or import a CSV file with column mapping, duplicate merging, a dry run before writing and a line-by-line result file. An import requires a consent statement: where the list comes from and that it was not bought, rented or collected without permission.

The signup form — footer block, home page or widget — needs no third-party service: a hidden honeypot field, a signed time token that refuses submissions sent less than three seconds or more than 24 hours after the page loaded, and a limit of five submissions per hour per IP and shop filter automated signups. The consent box is unticked by default and required. When a browser sends an Origin or Referer header, its host must match the shop's.

Double opt-in is on by default: an address becomes subscribed only after a click on a signed, dated link, with a reminder email and an adjustable expiry. Single opt-in remains available, provided you describe its legal basis. PrestaShop already records the date and IP address of a signup; the module adds the exact wording shown and its version, the chosen topics, the source and every withdrawal. The consent log keeps that evidence, filters it and exports it to CSV. By default the proof is kept for five years after an unsubscribe.

Every marketing email contains an unsubscribe link and a link to a preferences page that needs no login: topics, frequency, email language, full unsubscribe. Mailbox providers also offer one-click unsubscribe (RFC 8058); simply viewing the page never unsubscribes anyone. An unsubscribe cancels queued emails, stops running journeys and unticks the Newsletter box in the customer account. A suppression list keeps addresses with a permanent failure, those imported from the SMTP provider or added by hand, and inactive contacts can be identified and unsubscribed in bulk.

Segments built from your orders

A segment combines up to twenty conditions and ten exclusions: customer group, language, country, source, signup date, topics, account status, number of orders, amount spent, last order, products or categories bought, products viewed, cart content and value, vouchers used, engagement (opens, clicks), RFM score, birth month or membership of another segment. The counter updates as you build, and the preview shows the first twenty recipients with their orders and spend.

The RFM score (recency, frequency, monetary value) is calculated every day over an adjustable period, from 1 to 5 on each axis, with eleven named groups. You can assign those groups to a PrestaShop customer group after a preview — knowing that a customer group can change prices, discounts and shipping and payment options. Product view tracking is off by default and only covers signed-in customers: no anonymous visitor is recorded.

A block editor and six templates

The editor builds the email from blocks: header, text, image, button, product, product grid, recommendations, separator, spacer, social links and a mandatory footer with the unsubscribe link. Width, colours, font and corner radius are set once for the whole campaign; subject and preheader are written language by language. Six responsive templates are included — promotion, new arrivals, selection, reassurance, welcome and winback — and any block can be saved to a library.

Personalisation variables ({firstname}, {shop_name}, {voucher_code}…) accept a fallback value when the field is empty. Conditional blocks show or hide content by segment, country, language, customer group or a recipient attribute, and already purchased products can be removed for each person. A discount voucher can be attached to an existing cart rule, created once with a shared code, or generated individually for each recipient. The desktop, mobile and text previews show exactly what will leave.

A/B tests compare two subjects, two contents or both: part of the audience receives version A or B, then the winning version — judged on unique open rate, or on clicks when opens are not measured — goes to the rest after an adjustable delay. A test can also cover 100% of recipients, with no decision phase.

Campaigns, sending queue and scheduling

A campaign starts from a template, an existing campaign or a blank page. It stays a draft, can be tested to one to ten addresses, is scheduled with a date, time and time zone, then sends. You can pause it, resume it, cancel it, duplicate it, or resend only to people who did not open the original email. The estimate shows the number of recipients, the exclusions by reason and the expected duration at the configured hourly rate.

The sending queue is processed by a scheduled task to run every five minutes, through the provided token URL or the command-line command. The hourly rate is configurable (300 emails per hour by default, from 10 to 100,000): sends are spread across the hour and never exceed the limit. Each recipient receives a personal email, in HTML and text, in their language, with their variables, voucher and tracked links. Temporary errors are retried, permanent refusals feed the suppression list, and three consecutive transport failures stop sending for the shop with an alert. Without a scheduled task, the "Send a batch now" button processes the queue on demand.

The "Send at each contact’s usual opening hour" option shifts sending to the hour when the person most often opens emails, within 24 hours of the start; it relies on recorded opens and can be turned off per campaign.

Automated journeys

Five ready-made journeys are provided: a welcome series after signup, a post-purchase email triggered by an order status, a winback after N days without an order, a birthday message and a follow-up after a product view. Each one is a normal automation you edit: emails, delays and conditions can be added, moved and removed. A blank journey also accepts entry into a segment as its trigger.

An automation is activated once every email has passed its checklist. A dry run shows the contacts who would enter now and the next step of enrolments in progress, without writing anything. Enrolments stop on purchase or unsubscribe according to your settings, and a frequency cap — three marketing emails per week by default — prevents over-contacting the same person, with priorities between journeys. Abandoned cart reminders are not rebuilt here: the browse email never targets a product sitting in an open cart.

Tracking, reports and attributed sales

The open pixel (an invisible image) and signed tracking links feed the counters of each campaign, each journey email, each link and each segment. Opens are an estimate: some mailbox providers and filters load images by themselves. Clicks are recorded and then redirected to the shop address, with UTM parameters when the option is on. No advertising cookie is set or read.

An order placed with the same email address within the days after a click is attributed to the last click, seven days by default. Cancelled, refunded or failed orders are excluded; partial refunds are not deducted. Reports give recipients, accepted emails, opens, clicks, unsubscribes, bounces, orders, revenue and average cart, with a breakdown by link and by recipient. Campaigns, journeys and links export to CSV for your accountant or monthly report.

Deliverability: check before you send

The Deliverability page shows PrestaShop's sending method, tests the configured SMTP server and displays the server's exact response, then checks the SPF, DKIM, DMARC and MX records of the sending domain, along with domain alignment. Each result explains what it means and what to fix. Before every campaign and before activating a journey, a checklist blocks the errors that prevent a correct send — email disabled in PrestaShop, invalid sender, language without a subject, invalid link, empty audience, expired voucher — and flags what to improve: no test sent, incomplete DNS, silent scheduled task, image without alt text.

The module does not guarantee inbox placement: deliverability depends on your domain, your server and the reputation of your sending. It gives you the means to check and fix before you send.

Multistore, permissions and logs

Contacts, segments, campaigns, journeys, settings and statistics are separated per shop; the scheduled task processes every shop where the module is active. Permissions are granted per employee — view, contacts, segments, campaigns, send, automations, settings — and every action is checked on the server side. The action log records who did what, the queue shows each email and its error, and GDPR export or erasure of a contact's data runs through PrestaShop's GDPR tools (psgdpr).

Concrete use cases

• Welcome series: confirm the signup, introduce the shop and offer a first-purchase voucher.
• Reactivation: target customers with no order for several months using a segment and a suitable voucher.
• New arrivals: announce a collection to customers who bought from a category, with a product grid.
• Post-purchase: thank the customer, recommend complementary products and stop the journey if they buy again.
• List clean-up: identify inactive contacts and unsubscribe them without writing to addresses that should no longer receive marketing.

Which shops is it for?

The module is for shops that already send a newsletter, or that gave up for budget reasons: fashion, home decoration, cosmetics, food, spare parts, services, and for agencies managing several shops. The hourly rate is adjustable from 10 to 100,000 emails per hour to suit your hosting. Very large lists and high-volume transactional sending belong on dedicated emailing infrastructure.

Requirements and limits

• PrestaShop 1.7.8, 8.0+ and 9.0+; PHP 7.4 or later; json and mbstring extensions.
• A scheduled task is required to process the queue: token URL or command-line command, every five minutes. Without it, the queue can be processed by hand with "Send a batch now".
• Sending uses PrestaShop's transport. An authenticated SMTP server is recommended; sending through PHP's mail() function is often filtered as spam. The module does not guarantee inbox placement.
• No SMS or push notifications, no advertising audience sync, no connector to Mailchimp, Brevo, Klaviyo or Omnisend, no machine-learning prediction, no abandoned cart reminder and no pop-up. The browse email never targets a product sitting in an open cart.
• Opens are an estimate. Product view tracking is off by default and only covers signed-in customers.
• The module helps document consent; it does not replace legal advice.
• An active license is required. Without a valid license the module disables itself: no email is sent, campaigns and journeys wait, the signup form disappears and links in already-sent emails return 404. Reply-based unsubscribe still works and must be handled by hand. Data is kept, and the module is re-enabled from its configuration page as soon as the license is valid.

Keep your contacts, document their consent and run your sends from your own shop.