Step One - Set up your address Book
Before
you can personalise your emails, you need to collate the information
that you hold on each of your subscribers - just as you would do for
all your family and friends; you do this by setting up an Address Book.
The reason for personalising your emails is to get your message read by
as many recipients as possible and personalised emails, for example;
Dear Steven, carries, by implication, an underlying note that is seen by
"Steven" and is translated as being of personal value to him. It is
also possible to capture more information about "Steven" by using your
subscription form to invite him to give you more information.
Because
your Address Book holds all the personalised information on your
subscribers, it can be linked to more than one mailing list
Once
you have setup your address book, you can edit contacts, delete
contacts - you can also add additional contacts either individually or
in blocks.
Note:
In
Advanced mode you can setup multiple datasets. So, one can be your
Address Book and another dataset could be (Possibly ) 'Unpaid Accounts'.
You can therefore use the system to personalise a single email using
these two datasets
It may be that you don't currently want to personalise your newsletters but you do want to gather more email addresses
This is also easy - you just need to create a mailing list and setup a subscription form:
To create a mailing list
- Click on > Mailing list, click > Create, give your mailing list
a name and click to import. Then browse for the file to upload - this
can be Csv, xls, xlsx, txt (the import can be done with or without
additional data). You can import directly from online email accounts,
you can manually type individual email addresses or you can copy/paste a
list.
Step Two - Setting up your subscription form
(
This is ever-so easy - and following these actions generates the HTML
code to create a subscription form that you can add to your website,
Blog etc.)
First
thing to do is choose your own design - or you can use our default
design. Then Select the image that you want to use as the logo, next a
background colour, then choose the text and attributes. Then choose the
style of the links in your subscription form (for instance; subscribe,
unsubscribe & forward-to-a-friend links)
Step Three - Create your newsletter
Click
> Newsletters - then > Create - then give your newsletter a name
and select the folder where you are going to store it. You can select a
template from the 100+ that are in your account's Templates Library,
then click > Next and begin editing. Graphicmail Templates allow you
to change the text, import images and add links using the simple editing
tools at the top of the editor screen.
If
you don't want to use a template you can insert your text directly to
our editor from Word, or upload your own HTML template into the editor
using the 'Code view'.
To
insert images into your newsletter – either into your blank newsletter
or to replace the images in one of the Graphicmail templates, simply
click into Advanced Mode and proceed as follows.
A) Browse for the images that you want to use and upload them into the Images Folder.
B) Click
into the editor and having placed your cursor in the newsletter cell
where you want the image to be placed, click the > insert image icon,
browse for the image, click insert and voila !
In
Advanced mode, you can also import a Word document with images.
However, if you do this, you will need to upload the images from your
word document separately. This can be done individually or in a Zip
file.
Remember when uploading images, the maximum file size is 200kb.
Step Four - Send a test email to yourself
We
recommend that you send your test email to as many different email
browsers as you can – just to see how it looks. It’s also a good idea to
click the Spam Score button – this gives you a chance to check out the
legitimacy of the subject line, the content and the images.
Step Five - Edit your newsletter
It
may be that you want to go back and edit parts of your newsletter – if
so, just click >> Newsletters >>Edit Newsletter choose the
newsletter you want from the folder where you saved it, make your
alterations, save them, exit and you’re ready to send
Step Six - Sending your Newsletter
Click
>> Send and, in the screen that appears, select your mailing list
from the drop-down menu, input your selected From Address, then the
From Name, and insert the Subject Line.
Choose your newsletter from the drop-down.
IMPORTANT = Double check everything!!
Discovering an important omission just after you have hit the send button is not a good feeling !!
Step Seven – Checking the send results – Your Reports and Statistics
You
click on the Reports & Statistics and you see the mailing in a line
across, click on the magnifying glass on the left and this reveals an
overview which displays how many emails were sent, how many delivered,
opened, clicked, forwarded and unsubscribed.
A
single click on the + sign exposes exact metrics explaining why the
email was not delivered, or a list of all the email addresses of those
who clicked on a particular link
These lists can be exported as a PDF
Now take a look at Advanced Mode!
- You can set up Trigger-Mails (autoresponders useful for anniversary dates, follow up trigger emails to subscribers who click on a certain link in your email etc)
- Segment your subscribers and you can send targeted communications and marketing emails
- Advanced reporting - check out the Reports and Statistics following each send; you can do this per Send or per Mailing List or by individual recipients
- Upload and manage your images and files
- And much, much more!
