5 golden rules of email newsletters
By Paul Green
Email newsletters are incredibly powerful ways of keeping in touch with your customers and potential customers – but only if they read them.
That means ensuring your newsletter has the right content, is legal, and accessible by everyone.
Here are five golden rules put together by Publicity Heaven’s email newsletter experts:
1) Invest in great content and delivery: Hashing a few words together and sending it using Outlook just doesn’t hack it any more. It might cost a little time or money to write good content or use a professional email marketing system, but it’s well worth it. If you have more money than time consider using a full service package. Experts will ensure also ensure your email newsletters are legal.
2) Test everything: When you have put your email together, proof-read it and get people who aren’t close to your business to review it. Tell them what you want the newsletter to achieve and see what they think. Run it through a spam checker that will tell you how likely it is to be marked as spam (something as simple as putting a “£” sign in the subject can attract a high spam score). Send a test email to yourself to see how it looks. Test every hyperlink.
3) Make it accessible to everyone: Most email marketing systems send emails as HTML (which looks nice and has pictures in the email), but some people’s email blocks them. The answer is to send it as something called “multi-part”, where the email is sent as HTML for those who can view it, and plain text for those who can’t.
4) Drive traffic to your website: Fill your newsletter with reasons to drive people to your website. One way is to give the headlines and first paragraphs of articles in newsletters, with a link for the reader to view the full story on your website. Treat this page as a landing page, and have plenty of links to the things you really want them to look at on your site, such as your latest special offer.
5) Track and measure everything: A good email marketing system will tell you how many people received your email, opened it, and clicked through to your website. You should even be able to find out who did what. This is powerful for future targeting – send a second or third email to people who didn’t open your first (with different content of course).
