How to use the Email Creator
DISCO's Email Creator, combined with our Mailing Lists, allows you to easily send great-looking email newsletters to mailing lists of any size, much like you would on Mailchimp, Campaign Monitor, or Constant Contact.
Why should I use DISCO's Email Creator instead of Mailchimp or another product?
The advantage of using DISCO's Email Creator to email people and share music is that DISCO offers an extra level of stats that other services don't. With DISCO, you can see exactly how each recipient interacted with the music and files you send, including which tracks they streamed and downloaded.
How do I create and send an email?
First, we recommend importing your mailing list. Once that is done, follow the steps below:
Step 5. Building your email in the editor
Step 6. Confirming and sending
Step 7. Viewing campaign stats
Step 1: Creating an email
In the left sidebar, under Tools, select Email Creator.
In the upper-right corner, click New email.
Enter a name for the email (this is just for internal reference; you'll set the subject and other details later on) and click Begin.
Alternatively, if you would like to duplicate an existing email you've sent, open the Actions menu for that email and select Duplicate.
Step 2: Adding recipients
Next, we will add recipients for this email.
In the Choose Recipients step, there are rules available to help you filter who you are sending emails to.
Before adding rules, choose from one of the two available options to govern how the rules will work:
- Users who match: All these rules - your rules will work more strictly. If you add multiple rules, recipients will need to satisfy all of these rules to be included.
- Users who match: Any of these rules - your rules work less strictly. If you add multiple rules, recipients that satisfy any of these rules will be included.
Then you can start adding rules to narrow down your recipients, such as:
- Mailing list
- Name
- Company
- Location
- Contact tag
Each rule has the following possibilities:
• is not
• is
• contains
• does not contain
And you can use multiple rules at once. A common use for these rules is selecting a larger group, and then adding an additional rule to exclude certain users.
In this example, we added a Mailing list rule and a Company rule to send the email to New York Writers, but only those who work for the Freelance company:
Once you've selected your recipients, click 'Next' at the top right of the screen:
Step 3. Adding email details
In the Email details step, you'll add key details for your email:
- Email name is your internal name for this email.
- Email subject is the subject line of the email that will go out to everyone.
- Sender from address is the email address the email will show as coming from, and which any replies will be sent to.
- Sender display name is the name the email will show as coming from.
- Business address is your physical business location. (This is required on all emails as part of anti-SPAM law.)
If you've selected a mailing list in the select recipients step, some of this information will be pre-filled from your mailing list settings, but it can be overwritten for your current email if you like.
When you've added your email details, click 'Next'.
Step 4. Selecting a template
In the next stage, you'll be asked to select your email template. There are two options: a one-column template, and a two-column template:
This is just a starting point – you can edit and customize the content of your email, including the columns, in the next step. (Note that if you're duplicating a previous email, you'll skip this step.)
Once you've selected your template, click Next to continue.
Step 5. Building your email in the editor
Creating your email is just a matter of selecting content blocks and adding content to them. You can see the different block types at the right of the screen:
To add a new block to your email, just drag and drop the block above or below the existing blocks in your email. You'll see a yellow 'Insert here' tab when it's ready to drop:
For text blocks, you can edit the content within the block by clicking on the pencil icon:
And then edit your content inside the block:
Add links, buttons, images, text styles and more from the text editor menu options:
Overall settings for blocks can be accessed and edited via the right-hand settings column.
To open settings for a block, click the pencil icon:
For certain blocks, like image, playlist and button blocks, you'll add the content from the Block Settings:
Click Save and close when you're done.
Settings for the whole email (like the background color) can be accessed from the Settings link next to Blocks at the top right of the screen:
If you'd like to test how your email looks in your email client, click the Send test email button to send yourself a test copy:
When your content is good to go, click Next.
Step 6. Confirming and sending
The final confirmation step checks if you have everything you need for your email (recipients, subject line, content, address), and has quick links next to the content if you need to make any final adjustments:
When you're all ready, click Send email and confirm your send in the pop up:
And you're done! 🙌
Step 7. Viewing campaign stats
Once your email is sent, you can view in-depth stats about how each of your recipients interacted with your email and its content. To view your email stats, click the title of your email in the email list, or the 'View stats' link:
On the email stats page you'll see stats on open rates, click rates, most engaged users, most streamed and downloaded tracks, and more: