Everyone knows that newsletters are a great and cost effective way of keeping in touch with your customers, letting them know what you’ve been up to and reminding them of the services you offer. But finding time to create an attractive and interesting newsletter can be a real challenge, especially when you have a barrage of client requests to respond to… There just never seems to be enough time in the day!

This is what led us to create several components which, when put together, enable us to create beautiful newsletters very quickly indeed.

How does it work… In summary

1. We’ve written a script which runs every day and checks to see if we’ve sent a newsletter in the last 90 days.

2. If we haven’t, the script picks a selection of the latest blog articles from a pre-defined set of categories and populates a HTML newsletter template designed espcially for the purpose. The newsletter template has been thoroughly tested with a range of email clients, so we can be confident it will look great for everyone.

3. The templated newsletter is then scheduled in our 18amail.co.uk account automatically via the 18amail api.

4. 18amail.co.uk then sends me an email asking me to approve the newsletter for sending. This is the first time I’m actually involved in the process at all! Up until now everything has been running automatically.

5. I can then choose to edit the newsletter and write a brief customised introductory paragraph, or I can just click ‘approve’ in the email to approve the email for immediate delivery.

6. My newsletter is then sent out to our subscriber base and I can check open and unsubsribe rates in my 18amail account.

Hey presto, we’ve created and sent a newsletter in less than 5 minutes! Best of all I won’t forget to do it, as it all happens automatically every 90 days.

So if you like the idea of sending a newsletter to your clients, but never seem to get around to it, perhaps a system like this could work for you? Contact us if you’d like to discuss ways we can automate the newsletter creation process for you.