Earlier this week, I went over how to generate subscription forms for your free newsletter, using Mail Chimp. Today’s post follows up on this topic by describing how to design your newsletter and send it out.
1. After your email list and subscription forms have been set up, you want to go to Campaigns at the top of the screen.
2. Click the big Create Campaign button. (I usually select ‘Regular ol’ campaign’ from the dropdown.)
3. Select the List you want to send the newsletter to and fill in the campaign info and options on the next screen. Click on the Next button to move forward to the next step.
4. Now you should be in the template design area. Unless you really know what you’re doing, I recommend clicking the Design Genius button to guide you through this process. You can still personalize your template by uploading your own header image. Just follow the steps on screen.
5. Once you have your layout selected, you can customize it by selecting a color theme from the right sidebar.
6. To view a preview of your newsletter, click on the Popup Preview button above your template.
7. After you’re satisfied with the look of your newsletter, click the ‘Looks good, next step’ button to the upper right of the screen.
8. Now you can start editing the text in the headers, footers, and sidebar by hovering your mouse over them and clicking the Edit button. Some special areas to look out for are the ones in the newsletter sidebar and footer containing links to Twitter and Facebook. Make sure you edit the links in these areas to direct them to your own Twitter and Facebook accounts. You will also see some weird-looking, coded text with asterisks around it in the footer. Leave it alone.
9. After your content has been added, click the ‘Save and add content button’ to the upper right of the screen and give your template a name for future reference.
10. Finally, you can add the actual body text of your newsletter. Hover your mouse over the areas in the body of the template to bring up the edit button, and add your news content in the text editor screen. When you’re done with this step, click on Next to the upper right of the screen to continue.
11. This next step generates a plain text version of your newsletter for people who don’t have their email set up for HTML messages. Click on the ‘Copy text from HTML’ button to copy over all the info from your HTML version of your newsletter and click Next.
12. Now you’re in the final stage of the Campaign Builder. You can send yourself a test email, or change any of the newsletter options before sending your newsletter. To send your newsletter, scroll down to the bottom of the screen and either click the Send Now button or Schedule Delivery, if you want to send your newsletter at a later date.
Note: If you need to step away at any point while designing your newsletter template, you can click on the Save and Exit button to the upper right of the screen and return to it later by selecting it from the Campaigns area of the site.
Congratulations! Your newsletter is complete. :) Now you can use the same template and email list for future newsletters, so the process should be much easier going forward. Hope this helps!
Thanks & nice new pic btw!
ReplyDelete@Sophie Li
ReplyDeleteThanks! :)