How to Create and Manage eMail Newsletters from Your WordPress Site

Before You Push the Button on Your First eMail Newsletter Campaign — There Is Some Stuff You Need To Know…

Our Austin WordPress Beginners “Back to WordPress Basics” series continues with exploring an easy way for non-coders to create and edit eMail newsletters from their WordPress website. The Organizers of the Austin WordPress Meetup are often asked by our new members about eMail marketing. They want to know how to create an opt-in eMail sign-up form to allow their site visitors to sign up for regular newsletters or product announcements, and how to create and manage an eMail newsletter from their WordPress site.

Why eMail Marketing is a Business Building Block

eMail Marketing is an efficient way to stay connected with your site visitors while also promoting your business. With eMail Marketing, you can easily and quickly reach your target audience without the need for expensive printing costs, television or radio promotion. eMail messages are easy, inexpensive and effective. eMail Marketing is a way to stay connected to your Online Tribe through promotion, advertisements, and timely publications. For web-startups and small businesses, client communication using eMail marketing methods are cost effective, relatively simple to set up and let you track results of various campaigns. The easiest and most affordable introduction to eMail Marketing is to create and Manage Newsletters from your WordPress site.

Why Add a Weekly or Monthly eMail Newsletter Option?

In every Content Marketing class, we have ever presented,  we always suggest our attendees follow Copyblogger and if they are serious about mastering advanced content marketing, join the Copyblogger Authority Community. eMail marketing is crucial to a successful content marketing strategy for any blog or website. It is cost effective and highly engaging. However, not all your subscribers will want to get weekly email updates, some may prefer to get an email once a month, others may only want quarterly contact. By setting your eMail Opt-in form to give your subscribers to control how often they want to hear from you and makes them more likely to subscribe. We will provide links to a couple of good opt-in forms at the end of this post.

Why Building Your Email List is Critical

An eMail list is a collection of names and email addresses of people who have given you permission to send them updates and promotions from your business via eMail. Subscribers who join your WordPress site eMail list are interested in what you have to offer.  When a site visitor signs up giving you Permission to contact them by email, that user has taken the first step in building an ongoing businesses relationship. In 1999, Seth Godin, published Permission Marketing: Turning Strangers into Friends and Friends into Customers.

This book changed how we viewed and approached marketing. Godin described Permission Marketing is the privilege (not the right) of delivering anticipated, personal and relevant messages to people who actually want to get them. Since he introduced the idea over 15 years ago, many of us have become familiar with content marketing —developing the type of content that draws your ideal client to your website in search of specific information.  Godin compared permission to market to a dating strategy, inspire interest — engender trust — build the relationship into a mutually satisfying partnership.

Permission Marketing Can be Summarized  as Follows:

• Offer the site visitor an incentive to voluntarily share their email (giving you permission to contact them)
• Make sure that in exchange for the site visitor’s trust, your offer delivers value beyond expectation and familiarizes your prospect with your product or service
• Continue to enhance the bonus offerings to assure that the prospect maintains and even extends their level of permission based on the perceived value you offer
• Over time, your communications offering further incentives, build a trusted source relationship with the consumer who continues to grant access
• As your potential client becomes more familiar with your product or service, and you have made a favorable impression they are willing to become paying customers

 If you would like to read more about the Permission Marketing, please go to How to Use Permission Marketing to Build Your WordPress Business

Why eMail  Marketing Works

eMail is Personal — it allows you direct, personal access to a user’s inbox. eMail is Purposeful – the site visitor chose to signup for your email list and confirm their email address.  People who complete the opt-in process are receptive to your message want to hear from you. Email is Targeted –  The opt-in visitor has shown interest in your product or service, so you can provide relevant content that will help build the permission marketing relationship. Own Your Email List – Don’t be a Digital Sharecropper — build your community on your own website — and control your eMail list.  Facebook, Twitter, or Google can change their rules of engagement on a business whim, it doesn’t make economic sense to build your community in a space you do not own or control. eMail Marketing builds a one to one relationship. The private nature of email messages helps build trust and connection with the site visitor. eMail is the most direct and reliable way of getting in touch and staying top of mind with your customer.

 You Need Three Things to Build an eMail List:

1. A website or blog.
2. An eMail marketing service.
3. High-converting opt-in forms

 None of these require you to know how to code and of them are fairly easy to setup. For WordPress beginners, small businesses and non-profits we recommend MailChimp, one of the most popular and easiest to use eMail marketing services. For this WPATX Beginner’s class, Nick focused on setting up the MailChimp eMail Marketing Service WordPress Plugin. MailChimp is perfect for list building, you can create eMails with a visual editor, send and track them.  The signup form allows site visitors to easily subscribe to your eMail list from your site. Nick discussed how to use the MailChimp plugin support, and training documentation. Nick also demonstrated how MailChimp lets you create and send newsletters, manage all your subscribers, post notifications and auto-responders from WordPress. He explained how MailChimp drops your posts, images, social icons into your newsletter.

What is MailChimp?

MailChimp is easy to use eMail marketing software (EMS) that has several great WordPress plugins for designing, sending and saving templates of your emails. It provides a quick and easy way of creating, sending, tracking email campaigns, and lets you see who opened your emails, and whether they clicked your links. MailChimp helps you keep your mailing list of subscribers up to date with its subscribe and unsubscribe features. The software allows you to send personalized emails to everyone on your mailing list.

MailChimp for WordPress

• The MailChimp for WordPress plugin is a great solution for subscribing visitors to your MailChimp List.
• The Featured Images in RSS & MailChimp Email plugin outputs images in your RSS feed to MailChimp, and other services that use RSS feed data for content marketing.

 What Is RSS and Why Do I Care?

RSS stands for Really Simple Syndication, RSS is sometimes referred to as a web feed. RSS is a content delivery format used when you want to syndicate news and other web content.  News feeds are an easy way to keep up with websites without having to constantly visit them. When a website is updated, that site’s news feed can notify you and give you a link to the new content. To do this you need a feed reader, also known as an aggregator. Adding an RSS to your WordPress site is easy. All you have to do is add the word “feed” to the end of your WordPress website URL — http://yoursite.com/feed

Automated eMail Campaigns Using an RSS News Feed

Automated eMail Campaigns are the way to keep your site visitors informed of the latest news, blog posts,  products or services, and upcoming events from your website. With MailChimp, you can use your WordPress website’s RSS news feed to build the contents of an automated eMail Campaign that sends to the specified mailing list, at a specified time and day. This process gathers the contents of the latest blog posts,  including product news or, events from your WordPress website via its RSS feed. At which time a small portion of specified content is added to the RSS feed MailChimp template and sent in a formatted eMail to your subscribers.

Setting up an RSS campaign in MailChimp

• Create RSS Campaign
  • Choose the “RSS Campaign” from the Create a Campaign drop-down
• Add Your Feed URL
  • http://yoursite.com/feed
• Build the Campaign

 No Subscribers Yet? No Problem!

MailChimp can automatically generate a signup form for your list, which you can easily:

• customize
• share
• post on your website
• add to your Facebook page

Subscription Forms

• MailChimp offers the ability to easily customize subscription form options
  •  Gather to segment your list
  • Forms require double opt-in
  • For more information about the double opt-in

Importing Your eMail List

• Importing a list of contacts or subscribers who have opted-in to receiving email:
  • Uploading a CSV or tab delimited text file
  • Copying and pasting your list from Excel
  • Importing contacts from your Mac Address Book
  • Import directly from a third-party application or program—like Salesforce, Google Docs, or Highrise

Building and Customizing Signup Forms

• MailChimp automatically generates a series of signup forms and response emails
• The Create forms page has tools to customize:
• Unsubscribe sequence,
• Update profile sequence
• Double opt-in process

Signup Forms

• Steps for creating and designing forms in MailChimp:
• Embedded forms – Generate code that can be embedded on your website
• Subscriber popup form – a signup form in a popup on your website
• Form integrations – integrations with Wufoo, CoffeeCup, Twitter, WordPress, and Squarespace
• Facebook form – Add a signup form to your Facebook page.
• Tablet form – Collect sign-ups in store or at events with Chimpadeedoo for iPad or Android tablets

Build it

• To build your signup form and begin customizing:
• Navigate to the Lists page.
• Select the appropriate list.
• Click Signup forms, then General forms.
• Click the ‘Build It’ Tab.
• Default fields: Email address, First name, and Last name. Imported lists cab containing additional fields
• Add a field tab on the right side of the page
• Customize field text and set default merge field values
• Click Save & Exit to save all changes to your form

Adding an Extra Security to Form

• Preventing spam bots from adding email addresses to your list:
• Check the Protect your signup form with reCAPTCHA
• A Google reCAPTCHA box that says “I’m not a robot.” will be included on your signup form

Design It

• Choose the colors, styles, and fonts
• Style changes are made universally and not form by form
• MailChimp applies changes to each of the other forms and response emails for your list
• Use the MailChimp Knowledge Base for tips on customizing the look and feel of your list forms and response emails.

Translate It

• Translate it tab enables or customized translations in any of MailChimp’s 40+ supported languages

Creating Templates and Campaigns

• Once your list and forms are set up, you’re ready to start building an email message to send out to your subscribers
• MailChimp refers eMail messages you design and send to your subscribers a “Campaign”
• Each campaign is built using a preset layout called a “Template”

Creating or Importing a Custom Templates

• You can import your own templates or create custom coded templates for design or branding needs
• Templates you create are found under the Saved Templates tab
• To customize templates you will need to use the MailChimp Template Language

Creating Campaigns

• Regular Campaigns
• Plain-Text Campaigns
• A/B Testing Campaigns
• RSS-Driven Campaigns
• You can create a series of automated emails with MailChimp’s Automation features

Regular Campaigns

• Recipients:
  • Determine which subscribers will receive the campaign.
  • You can choose to send it to the entire list
  • Segmentation tool targets list
  • Subscriber data, campaign or e-commerce activity, group membership, manual selection, other

Campaign Setup

• Choose a name (not visible to the recipient)
• Email subject
• From name
• From email address

Tracking Options

• Add Google Analytics tracking to track clicks from your campaigns all the way to purchases on your website
• If you want to track purchases, you’ll want to be sure Google Analytics is set up to track conversions

Merge Tags

• Merge tags personalize response emails, automation workflows, and regular campaigns.
• Merge tags pull personalized or dynamic data from your list to:
• Greet each subscriber by their first name in the email
• Populate RSS or social media information
• Translate content in a campaign
• Populate unique coupon codes/links for each subscriber
• Include/exclude content within each email based on a subscriber’s profile information
• Merge tag Resources

Getting Started with Merge Tags

• All the Merge Tags Cheat Sheet
• How Conditional (or Smart) Merge Tags Work
• Smart Merge Tags and Groups
• Troubleshooting Merge Tags

Preview and Test Your Campaign

• Use Preview Mode to see how your campaign will render on desktop and mobile environments.
• If you’re using merge tags in your campaign — they’re replaced with placeholder text
• Placeholders let you know that the merge tags will be replaced with subscriber-specific information when you send the campaign
• You can preview subscriber-specific information before a campaign is sent

Preview and Test Your Campaign

• Use Preview Mode to see how your campaign will render on desktop and mobile environments.
• If you’re using merge tags in your campaign — they’re replaced with placeholder text
• Placeholders let you know that the merge tags will be replaced with subscriber-specific information when you send the campaign
• You can preview subscriber-specific information before a campaign is sent
• Inbox Inspector
• Automates the testing and renders campaign as they will appear across multiple email clients
• Can also run spam filter checks on the content to help identify potential red flags in your campaign
• Is free for all users with monthly paid accounts—up to 25 inspections can be run each week at no cost.
• Users with free and pay-as-you-go plans can purchase a single Inbox Inspection for $3

Sending Your Campaign

• Confirm is the final the step of the campaign building process
• Scan the campaign to verify that all previous steps properly completed
• Confirm will alert you to anything that might need your attention before sending
• You can preview both the HTML and plain-text version
• Run a final Inbox Inspection, or send one last test email to make sure everything is just right

Pushing SEND

• Send the campaign immediately or to schedule it for a specific date and time
• Paid accounts have 3 additional scheduling options:
• Send Time Optimization
• Timewarp
• Batch Delivery

Avoiding Spam Filters / Junk Files

• Learn how spam filters think
• Spam filters look at a long list of criteria to decide whether or not your email is junk
• SPAM criteria grows/adapts as spam filters learn more every time someone clicks the Mark as spam in their email client
• MailChimp has a dedicated guide – How to Avoid Spam Filters

Common Mistakes

• Lists: Sending to inactive, stale, or non-permission-based lists
• Formatting: ALL CAPS, crazy colors, and too !!! many !!!exclamation !!! points !!!!
• Content: Anything about getting money, paying less money, or money-back guarantees ❖ Code: Sloppy code, extra tags, code pulled in from Microsoft Word
• Images: Too many images, or one single image with no text

Mail Chimp Reports

• Help you analyze the performance of your campaign
• Provide insights for future campaigns
• MailChimp Mobile gives you access from your mobile device
• Manage lists, add subscribers, send campaigns, view your reports

Understanding MailChimp Reports

• Overview gives you at-a-glance information about your campaign
• Opens, clicks, social engagement, unsubscribes, and bounces
• Activity menu
• View or export recipients that interacted with your campaign in a specific way
• View all subscribers who received, opened, didn’t open, or clicked a link in your campaign
•  See which addresses bounced, unsubscribed, or even filed an abuse complaint
• Links give you a better idea of how well each tracked link within a campaign performed
• Find a list of all tracked URLs from the campaign
• The number of total and unique clicks for each one
• Populate a click map to give you a visual representation of how each link performed
• Social reveals who has:
  • Liked your campaign on Facebook
  • Provides a list of the top influencers and referrers
  • Displays a map of clicks from around the globe
  • Keep in mind you’ll need to integrate your account with Facebook — always a moving target

After Class Resources

I hope these class notes help. I have included a link to the class Slidedeck below. I’m sorry if the transfer from Keynote to PowerPoint format sometimes does odd things to the headers and some images. The Austin WordPress Meetup  Co-Organizers urge you to join and perhaps contribute to the Austin WordPress Tribe by volunteering to take notes for our wpaustin.com website, being a Presenter at WPATX meetups or helping with our annual WordCamp. You can always find the current class schedule at https://www.meetup.com/austinwordpress/ We look forward to seeing you at an Austin WordPress Meetup soon.

Follow Sandi Batik @sandi_batik / @WPATX /  Contact me at: handsonwp.com / LinkedIn  https://www.linkedin.com/in/hsandrachevalierbatik

Follow Nick Batik @nick_batik / @WPATX / Contact me at: pleiadesservices.com / LinkedIn https://www.linkedin.com/in/nicholasbatik

How to Create and Manage eMail Newsletters from Your WordPress Site