How to start your Employee Newsletter with Bulletin
Bulletin is an all-in-one newsletter platform that helps you create, edit, and send newsletters of any kind. One of the things it's very well suited for is Employee Newsletters. This article will teach you how to start using Bulletin to create your first Employee newsletter!
1. Set up your account 2. Create newsletters 3. Invite & Manage your team 4. Add recipients 5. Send from your email address 6. Add content 7. Send & Track your newsletter
Confirm your email: Start by confirming your email address. A link will be sent to your inbox (make sure to check your spam folder if you can’t find it).
Add your details: Make sure to fill out your First and Last name, Time zone, and Department in your Account settings. You can access your Account settings by clicking on your email address located at the bottom of the sidebar.
➔ If you are the first person to sign up in your organization, you will automatically become an Admin. As an Admin, you can create newsletters, edit all the content, and send it. As an Admin, you can make other people Admins or even remove yourself as an admin.
2. Create newsletters
Create newsletter [Admin feature]: To create your newsletter, head over to the top corner of the sidebar where you will see a “Create newsletter” button. To create a newsletter, you will only need to give a name to it.
Manage your newsletters: You can create as many newsletters as you want, and switch between them in the dropdown.
3. Invite & Manage your team
Invite your team: The first step after creating your newsletter, is to invite your team members, so they can collaborate with you. Head out to “Invite your team” on the sidebar. You can either fill out the form field or upload a CSV file. If you need to send more than 10 invites, contact support (support@ourbulletin.co) or start a chat session using the widget in the bottom right of the screen. We limit the number of invites you can send at first to filter spammers.
Manage your team [Admin feature]: Once your users accept your invites, they will be added to your team. You will have an overview of all the users on the platform when you go to “Team”, located on the sidebar. You can edit all users' information and roles. The different roles on the platform are Reader, Contributor, and Admin.
4. Add recipients [Admin feature]
You will find two types of recipients: Team and Contacts. Team refers to the users on the platform. Team members can choose to subscribe to a newsletter themselves. As an Admin, you can also directly add Team members to your newsletter by going on the “Team +” tab and selecting the users. Contact refers to non-users. To add a Contact, you will click on the “Add Contacts” tab. You will need to verify your phone number and add your physical address (necessary to comply with anti-spam laws) to add Contacts.
5. Send from your email address [Admin feature]
By default, your newsletters will be sent from hello@ourbulletin.co. You can choose to configure that by confirming your email address. Head over to “Organization” on the sidebar, and then go to the “Email Address & DNS Configuration” section. If you plan on adding your email address we recommend you also configure your DNS so that your emails are "signed" by your domain instead of ours. This will ensure great, best-in-the-industry deliverability, so there is much less chance your newsletter lands in the spam folder (a problem that all mass-email systems have, but unlike us, many of them won't warn you about it!).
6. Add content
The content dashboard is divided into three sections: Header, Body, and Footer.
The Header and Footer are only to be edited by Admins. The header is per-issue. The footer persists from issue to issue.
You can make an individual contribution, as a user, by adding an Item to the Body. You can choose to show each Item’s author by going into the newsletter settings.
Each Item has a Title, which can have a Link, and Content.
[Admin feature] As an Admin, you can Edit/Delete all individual contributions (Items).
7. Send & Track your newsletter
Preview & Send a Test Email: Click on “Preview” on the dashboard to preview your newsletter. [Admin feature] While on preview, you can see a “Send test email” button that will allow you to test send your email to yourself or another Team member.
Send newsletter [Admin feature]: Once you are done writing and editing your newsletter, you can send it by clicking on the button “Send Now”. Once you click, you will be redirected to an interface where you can review the recipients, and preview the newsletter before sending it. Alternatively, you can configure your newsletter to automatically send on a schedule, by going to your newsletter settings. Once your newsletter is sent, a new issue is generated automatically on your dashboard. The issue that was just sent gets archived in the newsletter “Archive”.
Track your newsletter [Admin feature]: Once you send your newsletter, you can track the open rate and click rate of each issue by going to the “Analytics” section on the sidebar.
