Do you publish an email newsletter for your business? It’s a smart way to stay in touch with your customers, and develop a good relationship with them, among other reasons.
If you’re ready to publish an email newsletter, here are a few strategies to keep in mind:
- Choose a Delivery Method – It’s important to select a reliable email marketing solution provider to ensure that your newsletter gets delivered to your subscribers, and not automatically dumped into a spam folder. Companies like MailChimp or Constant Contact offer several benefits such as:
- Tracking capabilities – reports allow you to see bounce rates, forwarded, delivered/undeliverable and sent emails, as well as conversions, click-throughs and more.
- Design templates – a wide variety of styles and colors are available to suit many different industries, or you can import your own HTML page
- Attachment abilities – you can add pictures, documents, background images, and the ability to subscribe/unsubscribe
- Create a format and schedule – Do you want to send a plain text newsletter or an HTML version, which allows you to include images, such as your company’s logo? Once you’ve decided on a format, you’ll need to determine how often you plan to publish your newsletter. If you opt for a monthly schedule, send it the same time every month, so your readers can rely on it. If you’re more ambitious and will be sending news out each week, pick a day and stick to it. Selecting the time of day to send will require some experimentation. The best way to do this is to run an A/B test of your newsletter; divide your subscribers into two groups, and send the newsletter to each group at a different time to check open rates.
- Decide what content to publish – The content you publish will depend on your industry. Real estate agents, for example, may send out a newsletter with information like, “How to get your home ready for sale” or “How to choose a moving company.” Here’s a tip: If your company publishes a blog, use that content for your newsletter! You can either put the entire article in your newsletter, or tease its content, and include a link to the blog article in the newsletter. This is a great strategy because it will help drive traffic to your blog, and you’ll be able to track how many people clicked the link. This will help you see how popular that article was with your readers. If a certain subject has a high click-through rate, you might want to write another article on that subject in the future.
- Review other newsletters – If you’re still stumped for ideas about what to include in your newsletter, subscribe to newsletters that are published by other companies in your industry. It should help you decide what to include, or leave out of your own product.
- Keep the subject line relative to the content – The subject line is the most important part of your email newsletter. If you don’t get this right, nobody will read your wonderful material! The subject line should indicate the newsletter’s title, plus a few words describing the content to pique your readers’ interest. If your subscriber sees right away what the email is about, he’ll be more likely to open it. But if your subject line implies something else, there’s a greater chance the newsletter will be deleted before it’s even opened
– Gloria
