Chapter 4: Creating An Automated Newsletter Campaign

Hey there friends!

A newsletter is a type of email campaign where you send business and content updates to your email subscribers.

Creating a newsletter campaign is a strategy that will help you engage with your contacts.

In this lesson, we are going to show you how to create an automated newsletter campaign that’ll pull and send new blog posts from your website to your email subscribers, on autopilot. Ready?

Getting Started

Create an Automation Email

If you’re using MailChimp, start on your account dashboard and click on the “create campaign” button.

Next, click on the “email” option.

On the following page, click on the “automated” tab, and select “share blog updates” under “featured”.

Now enter the name of your new newsletter campaign into the “campaign name” field, and then click on the “select an audience” menu to select the audience to whom you’ll send the newsletter.

Preferably, select an audience where all your contacts are added.

You can click on “begin” after selecting the audience to continue to the next step.

Setting Up Your Newsletter

Setting Up Newsletter
Setting Up Newsletter

Now it is time to start configuring your newsletter.

First, you have to start by configuring the content feed and send timing.

Start by adding the RSS feed URL or blog URL into the “RSS feed URL” field.

Here you have to add an RSS feed URL or the URL of your blog.

This will help MailChimp pull new blog posts from your website to add them to the newsletter email.

In this example, we are going to add the URL of the blog section of our website.

Next up you have to set up “send timing”.

Here you have to select the send frequency of your newsletter.

Start by selecting when to send the newsletter.

You can select to send “every day”, “every week”, or “every month”.

Send frequencies vary from niche to niche, but a good frequency is between one to two times a week, so in this example we’ll select “every week” on “Tuesdays”.

After selecting the frequency, click on the “time” menu to select the time.

You can find send frequency tips and best practices in our following lessons, and we strongly encourage you to check them out!

You can check the “resize RSS feed images to fit template” option to resize the images in your posts to fit your email template.

You can click on “next” after completing this set up.

On the next page you have to select “who you are sending to” with this newsletter.

Because you already selected an audience, all you have to do now is to select whether to send it to the “entire audience”, to a “segment or tag”, or to a new “group or new segment”.

For this example, we are going to select to send it to the “entire audience”.

You can click on “next” to continue after making your selection.

Next you have to configure the campaign info.

Start by entering the name of your newsletter campaign in the “campaign name” field.

Now customize the subject line in the “email subject” field.

Now enter the email preview text into the “preview text” field.

Now enter the name of the sender in the “from name” field, and then enter the sender email address in the “from email address” field.

Make sure to enter a valid email address that subscribers can reply to!

Now check the “personalize the “to” field option, and then add the “*|LNAME|*” tag behind the “first name” tag in the “merge tags” field.

You can click on “next” after applying these configurations.

Now you have to select a template.

In this step you’ll simply have to select the template that you created for your campaigns, so click on the “saved templates” tab to select your custom template.

Now it is time to edit the template in the editor.

Start by replacing the stock headline with the title of your newsletter.

Next you have to edit the copy.

For newsletters, we recommend that you update the copy in the template before the campaign is set, according to the send frequency you set.

In this example, we are going to enter a brief summary of the first blog post that we published in the week that we’re sending in the newsletter.

After the copy, click on the CTA button to edit the CTA text.

In this example, we are going to compose a call-to-action to encourage the user to read the entire article on our website.

You can click on “next” after customizing the template to continue.

Launching Your Newsletter Campaign

Launching Newsletter Campaign

Now it is time to launch your campaign!

You can review and edit your campaign settings before you do.

You can then click on “send now and start RSS campaign” and then on “send and start campaign” button.

And that is it!

Now your subscribers will start receiving your content updates on autopilot!

Chapter 5: Building And Embedding A Lead Capture Page On Your Website

Chapter 3: Creating An Email Marketing Campaign