How to Send Newsletters to a Mailing List
Make sure your website is live and you have an active website URL entered on the contact details page
- Login to the CMS
- Click on the [Bulk Mailer] button
- Select a previous email as a template to edit or start a fresh document
- You can add images, links, text, headings, and buttons. Use either the main Drag/Drop editor, or the TinyMCE editor for Creating your content
- Enter codes like [NAME] including brackets, where you want their personalised name to appear (*see footnote)
- Save changes
- Send a test email to at least a few different email clients to test. eg test your email is formatted nicely in Outlook or Gmail. All email clients have different rules about how an email is displayed, so it's important to test a template in each, to ensure you are generally happy with the end result. Outlook is notorious for displaying emails poorly, and so you may need to "dumb down" your design to suit. Once you have a good template, you can likely send it without further rigourous testing.
- Continue to search for recipients.
- Enter any search filters (#see footnote) , eg by security level or by group or by name - these field are not compulsory, if you leave them blank all members will be found who have the required member level to receive bulk email .
- You can add more recipients in multiple attempts, eg different groups, but it is safe, each person will only be in the recipient list once, even if they are in 2 groups.
- When you are happy to proceed to the next step to confirm the subject and reply address
- Set the email speed, reducing the speed will decrease the chance of your email being considered as spam.
- Click [Continue]
- Review your bulk email job list, and click [View] to review the email that will be sent
- When you are happy for the job to begin, click [Start]. It may take a few minutes before it does.
- Click [Stats] to view statistics on the progress of the email, and how many have been read, or links clicked etc.
- You can pause/stop an email job, make changes to the content, and restart the email.
- You can add recipients to an old email, and restart the job. Old recipients will not get any changes, nor any subsequent email.
- Copy an email, to create a new job id, if you want to send a similar newsletter again in the future.
Sit back and wait while the emails are sent. Depending on how many recipients you have and what your send rate is, this may take a while. Your job list can be reviewed at any time. Statistics will show you how many have been sent so far.
Avoiding being labelled and blocked as spam.
It is best to keep your email as simple as possible, if it looks or reads like spam, then it probably is. Don't do a hard sell. Keep your emails educational/infomercial like. Don't have obvious calls to action like "buy now", as they will add to your spam rating. Your first sentence is likely to give the reader a hint as to whether they delete right now, or continue reading. For similar reasons, it is advisable not to include graphic files, while these may look great they will add to your spam rating and thus decrease the number of emails that successfully reach your readers
A record of each email is kept with the job list, so you can use the same "hidden page" to send future emails if they are in a similar format. eg you only need to change the paragraphs of information and not the headings.
#We suggest that when you first use the bulk emailer,you should send it to yourself or staff only by filtering during the send - just as a test to get comfortable. When you are happy, expand the scope of the email.
*You can include the following codes in your emails including the square brackets, these will automatically insert data from your mail-list in to your email -
[NAME] their name from the member record
[EXPIRY] their expiry date if any exists
[PASSWORD] their password
[REFERENCE] members reference number if any exists
[CONFIRMLINK] creates a special link that allows customers to confirm their email address validity