9 tips on sending out email newsletters

Email newsletters should be part of everyones marketing campaign and yes a lot of people do use it and use it effectively, but are their methods efficient. In this article I am going to show you what is a terrible but common practice and then let you in on what you should do to effeciently get your product/event/company out to your subscribers.

One of our clients send out email newsletters/invites. They usually send out about 100+ email per newsletter/invite which is an average amount and rather small if you compare it to big newsletter marketing companies out there who send out 1000’s a day. Their problem is that they use good old Microsoft Outlook to send them through a Microsoft Small Business Server 2003 machine. They create the invite, send the mail and because the server is running as the SMTP server the mail appear as if they have gone instantly leading to the conclusion that they can send out another. Need less to say in one day they were able to amount to 1400 delayed message trying to cram through the small 512Kb per second ADSL line. Beside this not being an efficient way to send out mass mails, they are also missing key components in creating a perfect mass mail campaign.

So before you send out that newsletter or invite take a look at the following tips:

• Design: You need to show your or your clients brand and logo so that it shows users exactly who it is from and what it is for. The design must also not be entirely an image as most email readers like Outlook will block this immediately if it has not been blocked by your ISP already. Even though many of the emails sent to day can be read in HTML format there are many users out there that still use plain text/rich text email programs. This proves to be a very important option to allow users to select when subscribing which is my next point.
• Privacy: All email addresses that the email is sent to will be shown to the recipient potentially allowing everyone else access to that persons email address when that person might not want 100 other people to have it.
• Personalizing: Every recipient will just be part of a mailing list: “You are invited to an event with 1000 other people” where it would be nicer to say “Hello (Recipients Name), you have been invited to this event” which gives a nice personal touch.
• Reporting/Tracking: Current mail companies allow you to see who has received and even who has read your mail which allows you to track exactly how well your campaign is working.
• Subscription: People who are interested in receiving emails from a mass mailer will generally subscribe to it but with invites there is an exception as the users need to be invited to an event which they do not about. This practice is fine, but by lay you must allow the users to “Opt-out” which you will see on most email newsletters. This should stop any further emails to this person and cannot be done by Outlook or even Hotmail/Yahoo accounts.
• Subsriber choice: We want to allow users to self manage their name, address and preferences. Allowing them to make changes to their email record via an online address book saves time and effort.
• Bounces: We need to track messages that get returned for reasons such as the mailbox does not exist or is full. If bounces to an address repeatedly get bounced you should remove it as they could block the mail provider from sending mails to that domain which could cause problems if it is the likes of hotmail.com and yahoo.com.
• Forward to a friend: In most cases we want the message to go as far as possible and with email it is easy to add a forward to a friend option so that the recipient can send it on. PC and web based emails do not have this option.
• Mass Mail Companies: Use a company that focuses on mass mailing. The reason being is that they have most likely spent time and money on getting relationships with ISP’s to allow them to send mails onto their systems and not to block them. They also have dedicated systems to send out bulk mails which are designed for that purpose and not other. This mean fast and efficient mailing.

If you use a mass mailing company they will most likely tell you this, but it these few principles will lead you to a sound mass email campaign with you and your subscriber being kept happy.

Written by Seagyn Davis on January 24th, 2008
Categories: Technophobic