Newsletters

A newsletter your agent drafts from your own material, in a design made for the job, sent through your own Mailchimp account to people who asked for it. You approve every issue before it goes.

Newsletters are part of the Growth and Premium packages. On Starter the screen is not there, and there is nothing to unlock: it is a different product tier, not a locked door.

What Ampa does, and what Mailchimp does

The split is deliberate. Ampa writes and designs. Mailchimp sends.

Ampa holds the design library, drafts the words from what it knows about your business and from anything you hand it, shows you the finished issue exactly as it will arrive, and keeps the report afterwards. Mailchimp holds your audience, sends the email from its own servers under your account, handles every unsubscribe and complaint, and reports back what happened. Your list never lives with us, and nothing is sent from our servers: each issue goes out under your own sending reputation, the one you already have with Mailchimp.

This means two things for you. Your contacts stay where they are, in an account you control and can take with you. And the rules that keep newsletters legal and out of spam folders are enforced by Mailchimp on every send, which is stricter than anything we could bolt on, and is the reason we chose it.

What you need

A Mailchimp account on the Standard plan or above. Mailchimp lets its Free and Essentials plans build a coded email but not send one, and every issue Ampa produces is a coded email. If your account is below Standard, the test send will fail and the console repeats Mailchimp's reason in plain words, so you find out on the test, not on the real issue.

Then, in the console, go to Settings, then Newsletter and paste an API key from your Mailchimp account. Mailchimp shows you how to make one under your account's Extras. Ampa checks the key by asking Mailchimp who you are before it saves anything, then lists your audiences so you choose the one to send to. Nothing else in your Mailchimp account is touched: Ampa creates the campaign, puts the approved issue into it, sends or schedules it, and reads the report. It does not edit your audiences, your other campaigns or your settings.

Writing an issue

Open Newsletters in the console. Choose what the issue is for, then a design.

Every design is built for a purpose rather than a look. An announcement carries one thing you want people to know. A digest is several short items, for a regular round-up. A promotion is an offer with a clear next step. Each purpose comes in two designs, and every design uses your own brand colour and logo from the Brand and email design screen, so the issue looks like it came from you and not from a template.

Tell Ampa what the issue is about in a sentence, then press Draft with Ampa. The draft is written from the same approved facts your website agent answers from, so a price or an opening time in the newsletter is a price or an opening time you approved under What Ampa knows. If a figure is not in your facts, the draft does not contain one. This is the same promise the rest of Ampa is built on, and it applies here without exception: the agent never invents a number, a claim or a quote.

You can edit every word. Nothing goes out that you have not read.

Give Ampa something to work from

Under the draft is a panel for material. You can paste text, upload a document, give the address of a page on your website, or give the link to a YouTube video. Ampa reads it and writes from it.

For a video, Ampa reads the captions that YouTube already provides, so a talk you gave or a walkthrough you filmed becomes the material for an issue in a minute. For a page, it reads the words on the page and nothing else. For a document, it reads the text.

Two things to know. The material is treated as material, not fact: Ampa uses it for what to say, but a price or a claim in it does not become something the agent will state as true. And Ampa reads only what you give it. It never goes and fetches something on its own, and it does not read anyone else's content unless you paste it in yourself, which you should only do when you have the right to use it.

Approving and sending

When the draft reads right, save it and press Send me a test. The test goes to your own address through your Mailchimp account, so it also proves the connection works.

Then press Approve. Approval freezes the issue: the exact words and design you saw are what will be sent, and nothing is recomposed afterwards. Only an approved issue can be sent. The send goes through Mailchimp, to the audience you chose, now or at the time you pick. Mailchimp schedules on the quarter hour in your audience's time.

An issue that has been sent cannot be recalled. That is true of every email ever sent and is the reason for the test and the approval steps.

Bringing in your contacts

You can import a list of contacts as a CSV under Newsletters. The file needs an email column and, if you have them, name columns; Ampa finds them by their headings.

Before anything is imported you tick a statement that these people gave you permission to email them. Then Ampa removes obviously broken addresses, throwaway ones, and duplicates, and notes any role addresses such as info@ or sales@ that are rarely a person.

Every imported contact goes into your Mailchimp audience as pending. Mailchimp emails them to confirm they want your newsletter, and until they confirm they receive nothing. There is no way around this and we would not offer one: a list that has confirmed is a list that opens what you send, and a list that has not is how a sending reputation is lost. If some of your contacts do not confirm, that is the answer to whether they wanted the newsletter.

What comes back

After an issue goes out, Ampa reads the report from Mailchimp and shows it on your console home page. The report leads with how many people unsubscribed and how many complained, because those two numbers are what decide whether your next issue reaches inboxes. Clicks and opens come after, in that order, since a click is somebody acting and an open is often a mail app fetching images.

Ampa also reads the last report before it drafts the next issue, so the next draft adjusts to what happened rather than repeating it.

Limits

Your package sets how many issues you can send in a calendar month and how many contacts you can import in one. If you reach either, the console tells you the number, what has been used, and the day the next one can go. Nothing is queued silently and nothing is dropped.