Your e-newsletter will communicate more effectively if you follow best practices:
- Respect your audience’s time
- Keep it simple
- Monitor your results
Jakob Neilsen Users don’t spend much time reading newsletters. They spend most of their time doing other things. Users want their newsletter to “just work” Unsubscribing should be easier than setting up a spam filter which may also block legitimate messages
Delivery Give an example of “white listing” Users should opt in and “white list” “from” address Business newsletters should be delivered during business hours
what are “spammy” words? Russian font to English speaker FREE, ORDER NOW Anything to do with sex, drugs or money
Develop benchmarks to measure newsletter’s effectiveness in order to know what adjustments to make. Jupiter Research sample metrics 88% deliverable rate 20% open rate – Tells you how many times the newsletter was viewed (C: iContact’s best clients = 40 %) 9.5% click through rate 1.1% conversion rate
Develop benchmarks in order to know what adjustments to make.
Don't try to do this with Outlook or Gmail. Use the right tool for the job. There are many commercial and free programs that can help you send and track your newsletter. I've used PHPList and Emma. They both do about the same thing in a lot of ways, but Emma is much easier to use. MailChimp was suggested in a recent presentation. It is an Emma competitor with a lot more free options.