E-Newsletters

Category: e-marketing
Posted by Lloyd on 15th October 2006

E-newsletters can provide the most economic and high-impact means of putting your message in front of your key audience – targeted, branded, and measurable. But, as one of our clients recently said, “Wow, there’s a lot more to this than I realised…” So, what exactly is involved?

A content plan

Issuing a one-off newsletter is like placing a single advert – expensive to set up and unlikely to have any impact. In order to deliver momentum and ensure that the project doesn’t run out of steam after only a few issues, what is needed is an achievable content plan – a forward plan of articles - that can be delivered consistently every issue. To be effective (ie. be read), a newsletter needs to be short and valuable: it needs to deliver some new and useful information to its readers. A typical editorial plan might include: company news synopsis, product tip/news, an abstract from a recent feature/white paper/report, invitations to events or reviews following a trade-show. The plan should identify content for at least the next two issues, if not more. A rolling editorial calendar removes the burden of having to invent content for each edition of the newsletter, making the process much more time-efficient.

A design

There are typically two parts to an e-newsletter – the emailshot itself and a web page containing the full text. The email should be short and intriguing to drive traffic to the online full-copy web version. This two-pronged approach offers several advantages: 90 per cent of your audience will be too busy to read the full text so the email version will be your best shot at impressing them; click-throughs to the full version can be measured; and the full version provides fresh, updated content that alerts search engines (especially Google) to the fact that your website is alive, has relevant content and needs to be indexed and ranked more frequently.

The use of images presents an interesting dilemma when it comes to e-newsletters – include them and the email will arrive looking as you intended but it will be large and might even get spam-filtered. Exclude them (i.e. link the images from your website) and your email may look odd without them but you will be able to effectively track downloads. To address this, most newsletters use linked images with tags to convey meaning even if they are not downloaded.

A spam-safe mailing list

In general, many countries and regions have implemented similar anti-spam legislation, which is:

• In order to send a newsletter to someone you need to either have their permission or have an on-going business relationship with them
• The e-newsletter needs to contain:
  • A clear unsubscribe mechanism
  • Your full postal address
  • An explanation of why the recipient is receiving the email
  • A subject line that is not misleading/deceptive

To maintain a best-practice mailing list, it is necessary for you to keep a record of who has unsubscribed to your newsletter (rather than just delete them from the list), so that, in the future, they are not accidentally added back into the mail list.

A delivery mechanism that can track success

Having experimented with everything from emailing from Outlook mail merge to dedicated programs like GroupMail, we’ve come to the conclusion that for lists greater than 250 it is far better to use a dedicated email service. We use JangoMail – relatively inexpensive with excellent database integration, newsletter editing and mail merge options. In addition, it provides statistics reporting (delivered/bounced/opened) and email bounce handling. By linking these reports to website statistics, a complete picture of who has read what and when is available.

We provide a comprehensive e-newsletter service, from initial specification and editorial planning to full copywriting, email distribution and web hosting. If you’d like to know how we can help you or are interested in how much a newsletter programme would cost, please click here to email us.

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