Tutorial 4: Sending an email newsletter

Video duration: 5 mins 11 seconds

This is a step-by-step guide to manually creating a mailing list for your email campaigns and creating a simple email newsletter to send to the recipients on that list.

Creating An Email Recipient List

When designing an email campaign, you'll need a list of recipients to send it to. Hover over the Marketing tab on the top menu bar then click on the 'Lists' option on the 2nd level menu.

For this tutorial you're going to add a few people to your recipient list manually. You should add some friends or just put your own email address in the list. As your Online customer database grows with customers who've opted to receive your newsletter you'll be able to use this list instead.

In the action box, click "Create a New List"

You'll need to give the list a name (e.g Friends and Family) and save it. This creates an empty list inside the system that we can add subscribers to.

Now click on the 'Subscribers' button inside the action box

The 'List Subscribers' box will pop up allowing you to enter names and email addresses. Use this to add a few friends and your own email address by filling in the 'Quick Subscribe' form and clicking on 'Subscribe'.

When you've completed your mailing list you can close the 'List Subscribers' box

Create and Send an Email Newsletter in 6 Easy Steps

Now that you've created a mailing list to send your email campaign to, you can create the email newsletter by following the 6-step email newsletter wizard.

Start the email newsletter wizard by clicking on 'Create New Campaign' in the action box.

Step 1: Choose Type of Campaign

You have to choose the type of newsletter campaign you want to send. You have the choice of sending a one off campaign or a loyalty-based campaign.

• One-off campaigns are email newsletters that are sent once only at a time and date that you set to the mailing list you choose. For example you might write an 'April' newsletter and schedule it for 15th April to go to your entire database, this is a one-off campaign
• Loyalty Campaigns allow you to automatically send email newsletters to customers at an anniversary date such as their birthday, or after they've been a member of your site for more than a year etc. You can also schedule email newsletters to be sent to customers when they join your site using this option

For this simple email newsletter tutorial you will be sending a one-off campaign.

Step 2: Enter the Campaign Details

Fill in the campaign details in the following fields:

1. Campaign Name: "Friends and Family Website Notification"
2. Email From Name: [Your name or your company's name, so your friends will recognise your email]
3. Email From Address: [Your own email address] - you'll probably notice a red cross here. If you've entered your email address properly, the system will send an email to that address to verify that it's legitimate. This is part of the Online Business anti-spam measures. Once you've opened the verification email the cross will become a tick and you'll be able to send your newsletter with the 'From' address that you chose
4. Email Subject: "Come and Look at my new website!"
5. Select the time and date that you want the email newsletter to be sent. If you select a time and date that is in the past, the email will send immediately after you're finished

Step 3: Choose an Email Campaign Recipient

In this step you'll have the option to choose the 'Friends and Family' recipients list that you created at the beginning of the tutorial. You'll see that you're also given the option to make a New List at this stage or you can choose to email your entire customer database. Emailing the entire customer database is great for those periodical emails to keep all your contacts up to date about news, events and special occasions in your online business. Check the radio button of the list you want to send to and click 'Save Draft' to continue.

Step 4: Choose a Design Template

Your Online Business comes with over 150 professionally designed email newsletter templates to help you stand out from your competition. You should select one of these (e.g Internet, Formal) to see the difference having some graphics in your newsletter will make to your presentation!

Step 5: Enter Your Content

You'll now be able to enter your campaign content using the WYSIWYG HTML editor that is similar to the one for editing webpages. In the sample content, I've deleted the latin in the template and just written a simple email telling my friends to come and visit my site. You'll notice that I've used a few special tags, these enable the system to customize the email it sends to each of your friends for example:

• {tag_recipientfirstname} is replaced by the actual name of the recipient
• {tag_unsubscribe} is replaced by a link to an automatically created page that allows the recipient to opt-out of receiving future emails from you
• {tag_siteurl} is replaced by a link to your site

Step 6: Preview and Send

The final step in sending your email campaign is to preview what it looks like when it's sent as an email. Your Online Business also gives you the option of sending a test email to yourself by clicking on 'Email Me' so you can preview what it looks like in your email client. Once you're happy with it your email campaign you can hit 'Save and Send' and it'll be sent to all your recipients at the time you specified earlier.

You've Got Mail!

Once you've sent your email you can click on Reports and Performance to see how many people have received it and opened it, what links they've clicked on inside your email. It gives you a comprehensive report on the performance of your email campaign!

Click below to explore more advanced topics on sending email newsletters. Alternatively you can move onto our next topic which is Reporting and Analytics.

• Tutorial 4.1: Setting up an email loyalty campaign
• Tutorial 4.2: Segmenting your customer database to create mailing lists
• Tutorial 4.3: Measuring the performance of your email campaign
• Tutorial 4.4: Using email campaign tags