Sending your email newsletter from MailChimp
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Once you’ve set up a template to suit your business and created a contact list you can send your newsletter. In MailChimp these are called campaigns.
Click on the Campaigns menu button.
This page will show all your previous newsletters and any that are in draft format.
You can also do other things like look at reports on how effective your newsletter was, share it through different social media websites, but we will look at these another time.
If you roll your mouse over the light red Campaign button (this also appears on your dashboard when you first log in to MailChimp you will see four options. At the moment we will send a regular ol’ campaign so click on that option.
Next you will need to choose which list of subscribers you would like to send your newsletter to. You can also choose to send to certain people within a list rather than the whole list by clicking on ‘> send to segment’. Choose the list you would like to send to and press ‘next’.
Now you can start setting up your specific newsletter.
Name your campaign – this is a reference for you, what will appear in your campaigns list.
Message subject – what you type here will appear as the subject name when people receive your newsletter in their email.
From name – who your email newsletter is from. You can change this, for example, if you have different departments that would be sending newsletters.
Reply-to email – If your subscribers reply to your newsletter it will go to this address.
Personalise the “To:” field and Specify *|MERGETAGS|* for recipient name are both options for if you want the subscribers name to appear in your newsletter (eg. Hi Bob Smith)
Email tracking gives you options to find out how many people open your emails, what links are clicked on, and an option to link your Google Analytics account to links within your email.
You can choose to Tweet and post your newsletter to Facebook once it has been sent. Even if you don’t choose this option now you can do it at a later date by choosing ‘social share’ in the overall campaigns page.
Press ‘next’
All your templates will appear on the next screen, choose the one you want and you can put in your information for your newsletter.
Scrolling over the fields within the newsletter an edit button will appear, anything that has a red dotted outline you will be able to edit, just click on where you want to add/change information and the editing screen will appear.
Type in your information and press the little blue ‘save now’ in the top right corner and your newsletter will update.
At the top of the screen is a ‘popup preview’ which will show you what the newsletter looks like so far. In the popup preview you can also click on any links you have added to make sure they work.
At the bottom of the screen there is also a popup preview button and a send test button. If you send a test you can put in your email, press ‘send test’ and it will email a preview of the newsletter to you.
Press ‘next’.
The next page will allow you to create a text only version of your newsletter incase it goes to an email that does not allow layouts or images. As you can see it automatically picks up text from your main newsletter which often doens’t look very nice, so you are able to edit it easily.
You can also choose to view a popup preview and send a text version test to your email.
Press ‘next’
The final overview of your newsletter, you can see if there are any steps that you have overlooked, and you can go back to particular steps and edit your newsletter.
If you would like to send your newsletter at a later date you can press the ‘save & exit’ button at the top right corner which will save your newsletter as a draft in the campaigns area. You can also schedule your newsletter to send at a particular day/time, but note that the automatic delivery time is set up for an American timezone which you can change by choosing ‘edit timezone’ (also available from the dashboard menu ‘Account’ > ‘My Defaults’).
And press ‘send now’ to send your newsletter to your subscribers.
