A newsletter is the one email you send because you want to, rather than because something happened. Anggota builds it from the same content sections as your website, sends it to the groups you choose, and handles the unsubscribes for you.

Write one

1. Open More → Newsletters and click New newsletter.
2. Give it a name (it's only for your own reference, members never see it).
3. Write the subject line, and optionally the preview text: the line most inboxes show after the subject. Leave it blank and the opening words are used instead.
4. Build the body from content sections, exactly as you build a page on your website, with text, images, layouts and buttons.

Three-column layouts are not offered here. Email clients cannot be trusted to stack them properly on a phone, so the option simply is not there rather than letting you build something that breaks in half your members' inboxes.

Personalise it with merge tags: {{FIRST_NAME}}, {{LAST_NAME}}, {{DISPLAY_NAME}}, {{EMAIL}} and {{ORG_NAME}} are swapped for real values as each copy goes out.

Check it before it goes

Preview shows the real email HTML, although a browser is not an email client, and the two do not always agree. Send a test to one address and look at it in a real inbox before you commit. Test sends count towards your daily allowance, so they are not free, but they are far cheaper than a bad send.

Choose who gets it

Under Who gets it, pick any mix of:

• Contact groups - everyone in the groups you tick.
• Membership levels - the current members of each level you tick, worked out at the moment of sending. Members who are overdue on their renewal are included; lapsed members are not.
• Individual people - anyone else you want to add one by one.

However you combine them:

• Nobody receives it twice, however many groups or levels they are in.
• Anyone who has unsubscribed is skipped automatically. You do not have to keep a list.

Then choose when: send now, or send later at a date and time you set.

Sending takes a while, and that is correct

Newsletters go out in waves of 100 recipients every 10 minutes. A list of a thousand people therefore takes a couple of hours to finish.

This is deliberate. Mail providers treat a sudden burst as the signature of a spammer, and getting that wrong damages the deliverability of every organisation on the platform, including the emails your members actually need (receipts and renewal notices). The Sent and scheduled list shows live progress, so you can watch it move.

When a send pauses itself

Anggota stops a send rather than pushing through a problem. A paused send tells you why:

• Too many failures in one batch - a fair number of addresses in one wave could not be delivered. Usually an old imported list. Clean it up before continuing.
• A spam complaint - someone marked the newsletter as spam. Sending stops automatically.
• Trial daily limit reached - see below.

Nothing is lost when a send pauses; it holds where it is.

How the send actually landed

Once a newsletter has gone out, its panel reports what happened to it: how many were delivered, how many bounced (with the percentage), how many people marked it as spam, and how many unsubscribed.

The bounce percentage is the one to keep an eye on, because a high rate means the list is carrying stale addresses, and Anggota says so plainly: clean the list before the next send, or the newsletter after this one starts landing in spam folders rather than inboxes. Bounces damage your sending reputation whether or not you look at them.

Unsubscribes are recorded against the edition that caused them, so you can see which newsletter cost you readers rather than only watching a total tick down.

If your list was imported, check the first send's figures carefully. Imported addresses are the usual source of a bad bounce rate, and the first newsletter is where you find out.

On a trial

Trial accounts can send up to 20 emails a day, test sends included. The send panel shows a banner with how much of today's allowance is left.

It is a deliberately small number. A trial exists to let you see how newsletters work, not to run a campaign from, and the cap is what lets us hand out trials without vetting every new organisation first. Upgrade to lift it, or continue the send tomorrow.

Unsubscribing

Every newsletter carries an unsubscribe link, and it is not optional, because it is what separates a newsletter from spam, both legally and in the eyes of the mail providers.

Unsubscribing stops newsletters only. Members still receive the things they asked for by being a member: renewal reminders, invoices, receipts, event confirmations. Someone who changes their mind can resubscribe from the same link.

Tip: newsletters are the right tool for news, invitations and appeals. For anything a member is owed (a receipt, a renewal notice), use an email template instead, so it goes out automatically and cannot be unsubscribed from by mistake.