I’m trying to create a Newsletter for my music business but have no idea how to do this. I understand that it’s not just a normal document because users need to be able to subscribe etc. is scrivener able to help me with this? And are there templates that I can use for he design?
Thanks!
Best regards,
André
In Scriv you may write all of the textual content and store the images,
but for layout you need a word-processing program, like Pages.
In fact Pages has several kinds of newsletter formats, so you may
just want to use it.
If you plan to publish on the Internet, there’s little need for subscribers,
Because you want to draw wide attention to the newsletter.
Although you may create a “members only” section to announce
special discounts or programs. (It would be password protected.)
Finally, if you have a multi-lingual readership, as in
Dutch, Flemish, French, you may want to use NWP or Mellel
for word-processing. I don’t know if their layouts
are as easy and useful as Pages. Good Luck!
Newsletters by email or regular mail? If you want to offer an email newsletter with online subscription options, then phpList—or something similar—might be more appropriate for your needs.
I believe your website is hosted by VistaPrint…does it allow you to set up and run PHP databases? Some hosting packages allow users to run several databases from their web space…phpList is relatively easy to set up and use, although if you have limited database or website management experience, you might find this time-consuming at first—unless you happen to have a friendly geek to call on.
Scrivener is great for writing content, but you can’t manage subscriptions with it; and if you want elaborate designs and layouts, other packages will be more useful…perhaps Pages, as Druid suggested. If you email newsletters, what format will you use…plain text, RTF, PDF, etc?
Your website already has a mailing list subscription service, which presumably updates subscribers whenever you publish a new post. Does that not already meet your needs…a new post essentially being the same as a newsletter? I use WordPress on my site and use its mailing service to keep in touch with over 5,000 subscribers.
Right now, I finished creating a newsletter in Mail on the Mac. My idea was to send it like an email blast to subscribers of my website. My web-host has this option, but the layout tools for creating email blasts is very primitief, I cannot do a simple copy past between Mail and the server blast tool.
I checked ut phpList, but i don’t understand how to use it or even install it. Is it for Mac or Windows?
It seems that the only way to do it is creating a group manually in Mail with my subscribers and send it from there. Not sure tough if Mail can even create groups.
André
You create them in the Contacts application. Just create the group and then drag Contact cards to it. In Preferences, be sure to click the option that hides individual addresses in a group.
It’s true that you may create a simple newsletter format in Mail. Apple supplies some default templates and more are available from other outlets. See tinyurl.com/lczzhnf
Do as Druid advises: use Contacts to create a group and then send the newsletter from Mail.
To further ensure you don’t accidentally disclose people’s email addresses, I’d suggest you mail the newsletters to yourself as the only visible recipient and add your mailing group to the BCC field (NOT the To or the CC field).
Try a few test messages to your own backup email accounts and those of a few friends to make sure the process works as expected and that the formatting of the newsletters looks okay on different email clients.
Your ISP might have a limit on the number of recipients you can mail at one time, so if you have a lot of subscribers you might have to create several groups and send each edition of the newsletter to each group at staggered intervals.
Thanks for all the advice. I decided to go with Mailchimp, I can create newsletters and creating subscription lists with it. It seems to work great.