A Quick Guide: Sending Newsletters

ShareASale Merchant newsletters are a quick and easy way to contact groups or all of your Affiliates at one time with specific information that they need. Using either plain text or HTML allows you, the Merchant, to create a newsletter that matches the look and feel of your brand and website. This quick guide is a brief overview on how to send quality newsletters and where you can find specific items inside the newsletter tool within your account.

Newsletter Setup

When you open the newsletter tool inside your account, you will see this on your screen.

From here you can create a new blank text or HTML newsletter. For the more advanced, you can start a new split campaign with multiple newsletters to maximize your open rate.

Split campaigns are set up more for the Merchant looking to send multiple newsletters with slight differences. It can help expand their open rate and track what is successful for them in different campaigns.

Plain-Text or HTML Newsletters

When either option is selected from the main page of the newsletter tool, a new page opens that contains a box to place your text or HTML code. You will also be supplied a list of macros on the left hand side of the screen that we have created to speed up the process.

Macros are a great way to save time when writing a newsletter to a group of Affiliates. We will discuss these macros in a future post, but under the additional resources at the bottom of the page I have linked to a blog post that should help you understand them better and get you started creating your newsletter. 

At the top of your newsletter page, you will see a box marked “Recipients”, click it to expand the window like the example below:

Here you can send newsletters to Affiliates based on specific statistical information or demographics such as location, application date, and more. You can choose to send to as many or as few Affiliates as you like.

Once the Affiliate recipients have been selected, you can then click on “Compose” below this box and write your newsletter or place the HTML to build it out. You can then click “Preview” and bring up this screen: 

You can show a generic preview or a preview specific to an Affiliate. If you used macros, the specific preview will show actual information in place of the macro. For example, if you used the !!FIRSTNAME!! macro for an Affiliate named Joe Smith, then the specific preview will have his actual name inside the preview box. You can also send yourself a test to your email on file to ensure it goes through correctly.

Once this is complete, scroll down and click the “Finalize” button to bring up this screen:

On this screen, you can make the newsletter public or private to Affiliates. You can also include it on our public RSS feed if you would like.

Other options include what email you want the newsletter to send from and if you want your first name showing to make it more personal. Also, you can schedule the newsletter for a future date and time. If you like how the newsletter looks, you can even flag it as a template to use in the future to save you even more time!

Remember, once you hit save at the bottom of the screen, you will not be able to make any more edits.

Newsletter Tips

• Keep the information relevant! Don’t send newsletters just to send them, make sure you have something important to say to your readers.

• If possible, keep on a schedule. Affiliates appreciate a Merchant who sends out a newsletter with things like new products or coupon codes on a on a weekly or bi-weekly basis.

• If you are sending to specific groups, make the newsletter as personalized as possible. The information and graphics should cater to those groups as much as you can to differentiate them from a generic weekly/biweekly newsletter.

• Don’t get too long-winded! Make short, easy to understand points. You don’t want someone to have a wall of text or a long HTML graphic in their inbox they have to scroll through. Quick hitting information and graphics are the way to go!