Email Newsletter Design; Function - Ugly newsletter design and formatting. HTML newsletters, for whatever purpose, should be beautiful looking, well-designed, and have a strategy behind them, before you blast anything to your subscribers or customers. You might want to survey what your competitors are sending or people in your same industry to get a feel. Usually bigger companies have their newsletter design decent looking, although definitely not always. Your HMTL newsletters should have a nice header, footer, and side-bar, with your content in the middle! Everything should layout properly and look good ascetically. All emails should be tested to various email servers, like Gamil, AOL, Yahoo, and Hotmail, to make sure it displays properly. Before you blast a newsletter you should send a series of test emails to make sure all is perfect. It's never a bad idea to have another couple sets of eyes look at your email newsletters to makes sure they read well and everything is 100% perfect. Email newsletters should also have a purpose or strategy behind them, if not hit on a few purposes. They should be really friendly and speak to your intended audience and not at them!
Auto-Responder Emails - Most websites send various types of Automated emails or "Auto-Responders" to people for various things. When you sign-up, when you register, when you buy, when you are supposed to buy again, you will get an automated email about it. A lot of companies don't pay enough attention to their auto-responders, but they should. These emails are a great opportunity to do things like: Convey monthly promotions, Build Facebook Fans, Encourage Referrals, and other types of things beneficial to the company or the relationship in general. Auto-responders should be periodically reviewed to make sure they are good as they can be and are current with their content and messaging. These types of messages are usually text based, but there's no reason their can't have a nice, clean HTML design, but without the right column.
Building Your List - Building your database of emails should be a constant focus so you can re-market to them later. Annoying pop-ups when visitors hit your site are not recommended, but they can work. A pop-under is a way to ask for an email address to offer more information. Running sweepstakes on your site, with a nice graphic in the layout, can get more of your visitors to divulge their email address! You should focus on giving people the opportunity to give you their email address but not be obsessed by it! Another way to build your list is with "co-registrations" which are people that say they are interested in what you offer when signing up for something else. You pay for their contact info so you can send a follow-up company promotion and try to turn them into a customer, which can be effective from the right source. Always have a newsletter subscription box in plain sight as well. As you acquire customers your list builds and you can attempt to turn every customer into a source of referral through a referral program. Make sure to have your various lists separate or "segmented" so you can send targeted messages which tend to be the most effective!
Email Sending Best Practices!
Actually deploying or "blasting" your email newsletters and other correspondences can be fraught with issues, especially if you don't go about it a certain way. You can send them through your own server or you can use a 3rd party email sending tool like Constant Contact or iContact. Sending through your own hosting might be an issue if you have a limit on the number of emails you can send email monthly through your account. You have to check with your host to make sure you don't have restrictions if you have a decent sized list of 1000 or more. There are plenty of email sending platforms to choose from!
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