Newsletter

Occasionally we send a newsletter to our members.

Sending newsletter

Creating campaign

Create campaign on MailPoet. It’s the plugin we use for sending newsletters.

It’s accessible with same account and URL as our blog:

• Login
• MailPoet admin

If you don’t have an account yet, create one at wordpress.com/start/account and ask someone to add you to the site.

Updating subscribers

MailPoet’s subscribers and subscribers on the actual site’s database are not synchronised automatically. Therefore you need to manually update the list each time you want to send out a campaign.

Go to Trustroots admin panel to export list of newsletter subscribers as a CSV file.

Go to importing tool in MailPoet (MailPoet → Subscribers → Import) and create a new import with the file. It doesn’t matter if the CSV file has some existing emails — MailPoet’s import will ignore those.

Remember to delete both files after you don’t need them anymore. Especially the local one.

“From” email

You have a couple options for “from” email. You can override defaults for each campaign in MailPoet separately.

If you use our [email protected] address, people’s replies go to our support tool, for the support team to read.

If you would prefer other folks in your team to read replies, use [email protected] email as sender. There’s a list of emails at Zoho’s email admin panel to whom this email gets forwarded.

Note that we typically get a dozen or so “out of office” auto-replies, so it shouldn’t get too noisy. You can also create filters for yourself to funnel all newsletter related emails to a separate folder.

If you don’t want replies to newsletter, use [email protected] address.

Rollout

Test the campaign first by sending it to a small, internal test list. Once that works out, do the full-rollout on the main list.

Sending emails is throttled across long enough time. That’s so that email providers like Gmail don’t flag us for spam when they see a sudden surge of mass email coming out from our servers. Therefore it can take little while before the whole list is processed. Our throttle is currently (2020/12) 100 emails per 5 minutes (that’s 28,800 emails per day). This can be adjusted from Settings → Send With… → Configure. Read more about sender reputation.

Social media

Consider also creating a blog and social media material from the newsletter.