Email Newsletters - 4 Tips For Beginners
http://www.seo-marketing-articles.com/articles/3607/1/Email-Newsletters---4-Tips-For-Beginners/Page1.html
Henry Cass
Henry Cass is a best practices activist and advocate for Benchmark Email ( http://www.benchmarkemail.com/resources/OtherResource/Email-Newsletter ) a leading Web and permission-based service for sending newsletters By Henry Cass
Published on 10/11/2009
By taking the decision to start using email newsletters as a medium of information, you have probably taken one of the most positive steps towards communicating one-on-one with your customers However, beware if you believe that this is an easy method to deal with
By taking the decision to start using email newsletters as a medium of information, you have probably taken one of the most positive steps towards communicating one-on-one with your customers. However, beware if you believe that this is an easy method to deal with. Newsletters might be a better alternative to sending bulk email and spam but the differential is this makes it more difficult to create. However, despite this fact, if your fundamental objective of sending a newsletter is true then creating a newsletter would be quite easy. Here are some basic considerations to bear in mind when creating newsletters.
1. Objective: Why are you sending a newsletter? Are you an information service provider? Are you an internet marketer trying to elicit a sale using information to your advantage? Once you answer these questions, the objective of sending out the newsletter will be clear and you can be more upfront about your newsletter format. Therefore, if you are a news or information service provider, then you can use formats that purely cater to the written word and put in a lot of logical blocks of content. On the other hand, if you are using information to incite the customer to be interested in your product, then your focus becomes different and content strategy should change.
2. Content: The actual content that goes into the email newsletters depends on the kind of entity you are but apart from this, your style of writing should also be worth a thought. Writing for newsletters is a much more crisp form of writing where each sentence should be newsworthy and laden with information with no filler words to ensure a word count. The word count itself would be quite low because it is quite tiresome to read lines and lines of tiresome text. A good tip is to try and understand how newspaper articles are written.
3. Spam filters: These just could be your sworn enemy when trying to send newsletters. Spam filters are programmed to recognize unsolicited mails by recognizing keywords and patterns of phrases that could indicate spam material. Therefore, even if you are sending mails with the right intent, wrongly depicting your text could ruin the exercise. Take the time to learn how spam filters work before sending emails.
4. Audience: Your audience forms the last piece in the puzzle. Many newsletter disseminators believe that all it takes to send an email is a subscription to receive email newsletters but there are some basic considerations to make like bandwidth and the type of email clients at the recipients end. Bandwidth will sometimes prevent a fast download of HTML content and images while some email clients will block them altogether. This is a huge problem for you and could also end up causing the recipient to unsubscribe from your mailing list. This aside, a user could also mistakenly mark you as an unsafe sender. Cultural and geographical considerations should also be foremost in your mind when you are sending out newsletters.
1. Objective: Why are you sending a newsletter? Are you an information service provider? Are you an internet marketer trying to elicit a sale using information to your advantage? Once you answer these questions, the objective of sending out the newsletter will be clear and you can be more upfront about your newsletter format. Therefore, if you are a news or information service provider, then you can use formats that purely cater to the written word and put in a lot of logical blocks of content. On the other hand, if you are using information to incite the customer to be interested in your product, then your focus becomes different and content strategy should change.
2. Content: The actual content that goes into the email newsletters depends on the kind of entity you are but apart from this, your style of writing should also be worth a thought. Writing for newsletters is a much more crisp form of writing where each sentence should be newsworthy and laden with information with no filler words to ensure a word count. The word count itself would be quite low because it is quite tiresome to read lines and lines of tiresome text. A good tip is to try and understand how newspaper articles are written.
3. Spam filters: These just could be your sworn enemy when trying to send newsletters. Spam filters are programmed to recognize unsolicited mails by recognizing keywords and patterns of phrases that could indicate spam material. Therefore, even if you are sending mails with the right intent, wrongly depicting your text could ruin the exercise. Take the time to learn how spam filters work before sending emails.
4. Audience: Your audience forms the last piece in the puzzle. Many newsletter disseminators believe that all it takes to send an email is a subscription to receive email newsletters but there are some basic considerations to make like bandwidth and the type of email clients at the recipients end. Bandwidth will sometimes prevent a fast download of HTML content and images while some email clients will block them altogether. This is a huge problem for you and could also end up causing the recipient to unsubscribe from your mailing list. This aside, a user could also mistakenly mark you as an unsafe sender. Cultural and geographical considerations should also be foremost in your mind when you are sending out newsletters.