You’ve Created your Subscriber Lists.  You’ve created sign up forms and placed them on your website.  Now you’ve got subscribers!  Time to send them some email!

Sending Email Blasts to Subscriber Lists

VIP Club makes sending email blasts very easy and guides you through the process.  We’ll cover the steps below.

First click the Email tab in VIP Club.

This takes you to the Newsletter tab of the Emails screen.  This will list all of your previously sent (and scheduled emails).

Click the Create Email button in the upper right corner of the screen.

You’ll now be guided through creating and sending your email.  First enter the Subject of your email (this is what your email recipients will see in the mailbox) . You don’t need to worry about the other fields, just leave them at their defaults.  Click Save & Next

Now you are ready to write the body of your email.  You’ll be using the same editor tools that you create posts with.  A word to the wise:  Some email clients your subscribers may have are not as forgiving with styles as others.  Keep it simple!  The most important thing is that your email is legible to your recipients.

Personalizing Your Emails

The VIP Club email editor does have one special tool that allows you to perform some really cool functions and personalize your emails.  Click the VIP icon in the editor.

This will bring up a popup that let’s you add a variety of things:

• Insert a Single Post or Recent Posts from a Category into your email
• Insert a Banner into your Email
• Personalize Your Email using Mail Merge Fields

Let’s take a look at Personalizing your email.  In the Personalize tab of the popup, you can insert special shortcode that will put the first name, last name or email address of each individual recipient of the email so it look like you were writing it just to them!

You can also insert a number of different fields to individualize the email.

Let’s insert the First name by clicking the Insert button next to the First Name shortcode.  That inserts the shortcode right into your email.

Selecting A Template

If your VIP Club has multiple email templates, you can choose which one to use for the email in the Templates dropdown.  We’ll go into creating and editing Templates in the VIP Club Settings tutorial.

Testing Your Email

A little concerned that your email may not look just the way you want it once it arrives in your recipient’s inbox?  You can send a test version of the email to your self by entering your email address in the Test This Email section and clicking the Send Test button.

Sending the Email

Once the email is completed, we are ready to send it.  Click the Send button (this will not immediately send the email, don’t worry!).

The next screen will allow you to select which lists to send the email to and determine if you want to send the email now, or at a later date or time.

Scheduling your Email

In the Date & Time section, you can select to send the email now (default) or choose Send Later and select a date and time for the email to be sent.

Select Subscriber List(s) to Receive Email

Next choose which Subscriber List or Lists you want to send the email to.  Let’s select the Newsletter List we created in the Subscribers tutorial.

Ok, ready to send this email?  Click the Send button up top.

OK, we really want to make sure everything you did looks good to you.  You’ll see confirmations of when the email is to be sent, what lists you are sending it to and a preview of the email itself.  If everything looks good, click the Confirm Send button.  This will actually SEND the email!

Once you click confirm send, all of the subscribers in the list(s) you selected will be added to the email queue.  Depending on the size of the list, this may take a couple minutes.  Don’t leave the page during the queuing process!

Once the system finishes adding the subscribers into the email queue, it will refresh to the Queue screen. This screen will dynamically show how many users are in the email queue and how many have already been sent the email.  You do not need to stay on this screen.  The system will continue to send the email in the background to all of the subscribers in the queue.

Now that you’ve sent your first email, let’s see how it performs by looking at VIP Club Reports!