How To Send An E-Mail Newsletter

There are many advantages to e-mail marketing which can result in better relationships with your consumers. It means you are able to communicate with them more effectively and really market your company to it's full potential. There's also the prospect of gaining new customers which will generate more business for you.

With so many e-mails received everyday, you need to make yours stand out from the others when it hits the inbox. Your recipient will want something that is quick to access and which gets to the point.

How to plan for an e-mail newsletter

You'll need to answer the following questions:

Who are you sending the e-mail out to?
What would you like to achieve from these e-mails?
What do you want to include in your e-mails?
How many e-mails are you planning to send out in a given time?
What design do you want for your e-mails? Do you want to keep this consistent throughout all your e-mails?

Get permission

You can send e-mails to customers who have either subscribed through your website or have requested you to contact them via e-mail. Provide an unsubscribe button at the bottom of the e-mail so that your customer has the option to stop receiving e-mails from you should they want to. Make this option clear as it will only frustrate your subscriber if they have to go to a lot of trouble to stop receiving your e-mails.

Make sure you use a company name when sending out your e-mail so that it is instantly clear to the receiver who it is coming from. If they don't immediately recognise the sender they'll mark it as spam and won't even bother opening it. They need to feel they can trust you before opening your e-mail.

Design

The design of your newsletter should be approached seriously as it counts a lot towards how successful it will be. Designing for goals is the easiest way to do this. What response do you want from your recipient? Design can heavily influence the action they take when opening your e-mail. You’ll want to think about layout, such as how many columns you want, colour, typography and imagery. You may want to use similar colours or fonts to your website so that your brand can be recognised easily. Use seasonal design when appropriate to keep your e-mail relevant and topical.

Incorporating social media features in your newsletter will help gain more general awareness. Introduce ‘Like’ buttons to your designs so that the recipient can easily click to ‘Like’ or follow

your page easily.

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Subject line

The next thing you'll have to contend with is the subject line of the e-mail. Keep it short and snappy. Don't make it look like spam by using lots of exclamation marks and capital letters. It could be a simple sentence - something that draws the recipient in and make them want to open the e-mail. Make sure the subject is actually related to the body of the e-mail. Your recipients won’t thank you for it if they are mislead and feel like you are wasting their time. They’ll mark your e-mail address as junk and be discouraged from opening any future e-mails you send.

Content

Sectioning your newsletter will make it easy to read and scan. Chances are, your reader isn’t going to be interested in every single item in the newsletter so let them pick out the bits they want to read rather than give up on it altogether.

Make use of words like ‘Free’ while keeping it relevant. For example your opening line could be ‘Free shipping’ which will instantly grab attention. You could also include a question to open your e-mail that you think your recipient would be interested in hearing the answer to. For example, ‘Want 75% of your next order?’

Making use of numbers also helps get your message across as big, bold figures are easily processed and stick in the reader’s mind.

Another option is to leave a teaser at the bottom of the e-mail to keep your recipient interested and engaged with your company. For example, ‘Coming up next month...’

Images

You need to be careful when using images as a lot of the time they won't automatically display when the receiver opens up their e-mail. They'll have to select an option which then enables them to view the images. This is why it's important to make your headings and texts stand out and not to solely rely on the use of images. It's a good idea to test the e-mail out on an e-mail service to see how exactly how the message is displayed. This is also a good opportunity to test that all links and any videos included are all working properly. Remember, once the e-mail is sent, it can't be taken back.

How to send an e-mail newsletter