I would start with the starter kit. I would email each player a link to download the game rules and I would set up one appointment with either all players together or each one individually to have them create their character, if they prefer to create one instead of going with a pre-generated.
During play, Player's Guide would be available to people not eating chips or food
I would offer one set of gaming dice to new players. Something nice like a nice set form Chessex or Q-Workshop with a little pouch. It all depends of your resources, but once I have met each player
and we created his/her char, according to class and role I buy a set of dice which I offer (I do this
for new players I introduce to the game, even if they are already playing other RPGs but not D&D yet).
Ask each player to have a folder for his character, and to _never_ _ever_ remove anything from it.
If they, from time to time, redo their player's sheet to get a cleaner one, ask them to keep everything
in the folder : the very fist sheet, every map they have drawned, every note they have taken.
10 or 20 years from now, each of those folders becomes a great memory as some sheets will not only
have maps but also notes from great campains ! Keep everything : that's important.
As a DM, I try to keep my players alive for the first few levels. So until they are out of the first "ladder" of levels, I will tweak or change rolls in order to keep them alive. I might kill everyone but one character, but at least one of them will get alive out of it in order to be able to have players brought back to life.
Once we are out of this first ladder, if the dice do kill the players, they die. I will not intervene. So they can all die in a game session. As soon my players are out of the first ladder, I thus always have in my bag a scenario/campaign that start at level 1, with pre-generateed chars. So if the players are all killed, they can either roll new ones or grab pre-generateed players and we start a campain at level 1.
Later, when they grow up in levels, I offer them the choice to try again the scenario or campain that killed them. I tell them we learned of a group that was killed there, and they might be sent to discover what happened since that team never came back. Once they get in the area where the first group got killed, they either find the dead people (and can pillage all equipment as a bonus) or find they dead bodies have been eaten/moved/looted and they can not only try the scenario/campain again, but try to discover what happened to their dead characters. I did this once, and they loved it, and got their revenge from the bad guy, and their previous chars equipement (more or so).
This made the world feel "persistent" and linked their new chars to the ones that died, and the world became much more real for them.
