How To Send A HTML Newsletter With CampaignMonitor.com
October 7th, 2008
My HTML Newsletter posts have been popular so I’m going to continue the series with a walk-thru on how to send an email campaign using . There are other email campaign services out there but I have found Campaign Monitor to be the best for my purposes. This is a paid service but it is fairly reasonable. It will run you $5 per newsletter plus $0.01 for every subscriber on your list. Therefore, if you have 100 people on your mailing list it will cost your $6 to send out your newsletter. If you are dealing with a larger subscriber list, I’d recommend looking into a self-hosted option.
Step 1 – Register an account and add your subscriber list
The first step is to setup your user account. Once you have done that, login into your account and click on the Manage Subscribers tab. From there click on the Create a New List button. At this point you have a couple of options for importing your subscribers. You can either manually enter them or there is an option to import a text file with your subscribers list.
Step 2 – Design your email newsletter
Once you have designed your email newsletter, upload it to your server. There is a template for creating your newsletter if you need it. Once you have designed the newsletter and uploaded it to your server, view the newsletter in your browser and copy the URL to your clipboard.
Step 3- Setting and sending up your campaign
Return to campaignmonitor.com and login to your account. Click the Create/Send Campaign tab then click on the Create New Campaign Button. Fill out the form on that page and click the Next button to move to the next page. On this page, you will be presented with 2 options: HTML and Plain Text format or Plain Text only format. You want to choose HTML and Plain Text. At this point I should point out that you should create a text only version of your email newsletter. When you send your campaign you will send the HTML version and the text version. Campaign Monitor can detect if your subscriber has HTML turned off on their email client. If they do, it will substitute the the HTML version with the text version. This way all of your subscribers will get a readable version of your newsletter.
On the next screen choose the Enter the location of your campaign on the web option and hit next. On the following page paste the URL of your newsletter into the field and click the Get Campaign button. Make sure you click the include inline styles checkbox. This is for email clients like Gmail. On the next screen you’ll be prompted to allow Campaign Monitor to add an unsubscribe link to your newsletter. Allow them to include this feature on your newsletter. It’s an easy way for your subscribers to cancel their subscription if they wish to. Following the unsubscribe option, you will prompted to paste the text version of your email in. Paste in the text version and move to the next screen. At this point, you can click the Preview My Campaign button to check that your newsletter is displaying properly. Once you are happy with the look of your newsletter, move onto the next screen and choose your subscriber list that you would like to send this message too (you can have multiple subscriber lists). At this point you are almost done. Review and confirm the details of your campaign and pay.
Monitoring your campaign
Once you have sent your campaign, the real power of Campaign Monitor comes into play. Click on the Reports tab on the main navigation and select your newsletter from the list. From this screen you can view your campaign snapshot that will show you stats like: total email opened, unique emails opened, link clicks, unsubscribed readers, bounced, delivered, etc…
That’s about it – this is just a quick tutorial to get you started. Campaign Monitor has a ton of other stats and subscriber list features that you can tap into. This is a great tool for promoting your business or blog.
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