You have created your opt-in form and a welcome workflow to greet new subscribers to your email list. Now you want to regularly reach out to them with your weekly, bi-weekly or monthly newsletters.
You can send regular newsletters from the emails section of your account. 🙌
1. Click the emails tab in the menu and then the + New email button.
2. In the email templates gallery, choose from one of our pre-designed templates and customize it to suit your needs. Use it as an inspiration as you work on your weekly email. Or create your own newsletter.
Click on each category on the left to access the available templates or browse them all at once. And remember: you can also start from scratch.
3. Click on a template’s card to view its details.
In this example, we select the Share news > Seasonal updates template.
Use the desktop and mobile icons to explore how this email template works on various devices.
Finally, click on the Customize button to start editing the email template.
4. To start editing the email template, click on any of the existing elements and use the settings panel on the right to change the font, upload your custom brand font, pick a different font color, upload an image, add a link, etc.
Important: Make sure you don’t drag and drop images into your emails. Our platform does not support the drag-and-drop function, which can impact how your information is saved.
5. You can delete any email building block if you don’t need it. Simply click on it once so the whole block is selected. You’ll see a blue highlight around it. Click on the trash bin icon.
6. If you want to reorder the blocks in your email, hover your mouse over the block until you see the little hand grab appear. Click once and hold while you drag the whole block up or down in the email builder.
7. Tweak any email templates to your heart’s desire by adding other blocks to your email.
For example, you may want to add a video block after the first paragraph. To do so, hover over the text block and click on the plus sign (+). This expands the available email building blocks. Select the Video block from the list.
8. Continue editing and updating the template with your copy text, images and graphics until you're happy with the result.
Important: After you complete your content in one layout or text block, click outside of the email content, into the whitespace underneath the heart icon or the desktop/mobile preview icons and wait until you see it move from Saving to Saved in the bottom right corner.
Hint: You can update the email’s backdrop color or the link color in one go. Just click on the background area below the desktop and mobile preview icons. This opens the Global style tab, where you can pick the desired colors.
Or you can even add a border to your email under the Global style tab! Just select a border color and a border thickness.
9. When you're finished, click Next on the top right navigation flow.
You'll be able to choose your sender profile, subject line, preview text, send time and more in the next few screens.
10. On the last screen, you can use the Send a test feature to send the email to your email address and double-check everything on your desktop and mobile device before sending it to your selected recipients.
The preview text doesn't show in my test emails
The preview text isn't attached to the test email and isn't truly populated until you send the live email. But once you schedule your email to send (now or later) and assign preview text to your email, that is what will send to your subscribers.
Links in test emails expire after a few hours due to security reasons. If you click on an expired link, you will see an error message stating, “The page you are looking for could not be found or no longer exists.”
Note: This is only for test emails. Links will not expire when you send the email live to your audience.
Decide if you want to send your weekly email now or later and you’re done!
If you schedule the email for a later date and time for a recipient segment, the email goes to everyone in that segment at the time the email goes out, and not to only those who were in the segment when you scheduled it.
Remember, once you send the email to your recipients, you can't unsend it or recall the email.
If you had a typo in the email or missed adding a link, duplicate the email from your emails dashboard, edit it as needed and send out the updated version to your audience. We recommend writing a new subject line for this email, like 'Ooops, I made a mistake, here's the missing link'—or similar.
Troubleshooting: if your email doesn't send
(1) If you select a segment as the recipient that has no subscribers in it yet, you won't be able to send or schedule the email. Always select segments with subscribers.
(2) If you add an individual email address as a recipient, note that it has to be an existing email address from your Audience. Flodesk can only be used to send emails to your subscribers who consented to get marketing emails from you.
(3) If you get the following error message when trying to send or schedule an email—"Your email contains custom field snippet(s) with missing character or invalid syntax and cannot be sent. Please return to the design step and re-insert them"
—make sure to remove any brackets like these { } from your email copy.
Summary
To send out your regular email newsletters, go to your emails dashboard and click on the + New email button.
Pick a pre-designed email template from the email template gallery or start an email from scratch and customize it according to your needs.
More to learn: