Bravenet Newsletter Program - Plain Text Newsletter
If you have been following the last few tutorials in sequence, you should already have the Bravenet Mailing List program set up to work with your website and your subscriber list ready to receive your first newsletter. There are two types of newsletters that you can send using the Bravenet Mailing List program; plain text format or HTML format. In this tutorial we cover the step-by-step process for sending a plain text newsletter. A plain text newsletter does not have any HTML formatting or any images. You can use only plain text and blank lines.
Header and Footer
Log in to the Bravenet Members Area and go to the Mailing List Service Manager page. Now click on the General Settings button in the Maintenance section. At the bottom of the General Settings page is the Email Template section and two input boxes. You will use these boxes to input the header and footer for your newsletter. Each issue of your newsletter will have this same header and footer.
- Message Header
Here you will put the information that introduces your newsletter to your readers. One of the reasons that you will want this section to be the same for each issue is to make it easy for your visitors to recognize your newsletter by reading just the first few lines of the message. This is called brand recognition. You might want to put the name of your newsletter and an attention line.
Let's use a guilt store as our example. This quilt store sends out a newsletter announcing a different free pattern give-away each month. You might use the following as the heading for the newsletter.
Mom's Quilt Shop Monthly Newsletter.
Quilt Square of the Month free pattern. Stop by the store and pick up your free pattern today.
As you can see, by reading just these few lines the reader knows that this is a newsletter from her favorite quilt shop. After she receives one or two of these monthly newsletters she will begin to anticipate the next Quilt Square of the Month.
- Message Footer
Again, here you will put the information that will be the same for each issue of the newsletter. It is good practice to put a link for your readers to use if they want to unsubscribe to the newsletter at the bottom of each issue. In fact the Bravenet program has taken care of that for you. It adds this link automatically to the footer of each newsletter. But what else could you put here? Perhaps you would put a coupon that never expires. There is a store near me that includes a 10% off coupon with each of their newsletters.
When you are finished, click on the Save Changes button to store your header and footer and return to the Service Manager page.
Body and Subject Line
Go to the Send Email section on the Service Manager page and click on the Send Plain Text Email link. On the Send Email To Your List page you will see two input boxes. One box is for the subject line of your newsletter and the other is for the body of the newsletter.
- Email Subject
This is the line that will appear as the subject line in your email message.
- Plain Text Message
Here you will put the part of the newsletter that will change with each issue. Using the quilt store example again, here is where you would talk about what is on sale this month or about any quilting classes, etc.
When you are finished, click on the Preview button and the program will send you a test copy of your newsletter. It will be sent to the default email address from your general settings. If all is ok with the test copy, click the Send button to send the newsletter to your list of subscribers.
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