In the Club
Design a template for newsletters
Sending regular newsletters is a great way to keep members informed about what’s happening in your club. You could send this as a simple email, but if you want more professional-looking results, try a newsletter service. Here, we’ll explain how to use Emailoctopus ( https://emailoctopus.com), which has plenty of templates you can customise, and also lets you create your own.
Create a list of subscribers
First, we should point out that the free version of Emailoctopus has a few limitations. You can only send emails to a maximum of 2,500 subscribers, and no more than 10,000 emails per month in total - so, for example, if you have 2,500 members, you’ll be able to send four newsletters a month. If you have more than 2,500 subscribers, switch to Pro, which costs from £18 a month.
Sign up to the service, validate your account by clicking the link you receive in an email, then fill in your personal details such as your first and last name, club name, club website address, and so on. Click ‘Next’, then enter your club’s address (you need to do this to comply with anti-spam laws). Click ‘Next’ again, and Emailoctopus will review your account to make sure everything is fine.
You now need to create a list of subscribers. Click ‘Lists’, followed by the ‘Create a list’ button on the page that opens. Enter the name of your club, then either import the list of subscribers from a file (in CSV, DSV or TXT format) or enter each member’s details, one at a time. Each entry requires an email address, first name, last name and status (subscribed or unsubscribed).
Choose or create your template
Emailoctopus comes with 34 templates. To browse them, click the Templates tab at the top followed by ‘Our templates’. Alternatively, create your own. Click ‘Your templates’, then the ‘Create a template’ button.
You can create templates using either the Classic editor (which is ideal for basic emails or editing text and HTML) or Drag & Drop, where you drag blocks of content such as sections and headings. The latter is the easier option for beginners, so we’ll use that.
Click ‘Choose’ under Drag & Drop, give your template a name, then click Logo. Click ‘Change image’ to upload your club’s logo, then use the slider to adjust its size. You also have the option of adding a generic image to the template, by clicking ‘Choose an image’. However, you’ll probably want to use a different image for each edition of your newsletter, so you could leave this blank, or type a reminder to insert the main image, as we have done ( 1 in screenshot below).
Now click the text boxes under the image and start typing to change the text. You can add a background colour and, in the left sidebar 2 , adjust line spacing, margins and padding (the space between content and its border). A formatting bar appears above the text 3 , which you can use to change the font, text size and colour, and add URL links.
Click the Back button to go to the editor screen, then click Content. From here you can add elements to your template by dragging and dropping the relevant box (title, text, image and so on) to a place on the template. Use the Rows section to add more spaces for content, or Settings to customise the background colour (or add a background image) and adjust the style, size and colour of your text.
Click ‘Preview’ ( 1 in screenshot above) to see what your template looks like. The screenshot shows how ours looks on a computer screen 2 , but you can also check what it looks like on a phone 3 . When you’ve finished designing your template, click Save at the top right.
Send your newsletter
To send your first newsletter, click Campaigns, then ‘Create a campaign’. Choose which type of email to send: regular (one-off) or automated (when someone subscribes). Fill in your details as the sender, and select the list of recipients. Advanced tracking options can tell you who has opened the newsletter and when. Click ‘Save & next’ at the top right, then ‘Your templates’ and choose the template you created. The editor screen will open. Now you can write your newsletter, adding images as you go. When you’ve finished, click ‘Save & next’, then choose when to send the newsletter - immediately or at a specific time.