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Best Practices For Your Email Newsletter

By: Karen Scharf

Email newsletters are an excellent way to market your business, highlight your expertise and build a relationship with your prospects and customers. Email newsletters are relatively easy and inexpensive to produce, but that doesn't mean they're fool-proof.

You'll need to deal with CAN-Spam laws, delivery problems, rendering issues, etc. But by using a little common sense, having some common courtesy and following a few best practices, you can produce your own email newsletter on a regular basis.

I've determined the best practices for email newsletters are:

Deliver ability is job one.

Obviously, if your newsletter isn't getting delivered, it's not getting read. Check your SPF record, monitor your reputation and sender score, register with the feedback loops.

If you don't want to deal with the technical aspects, hire an expert. This issue is just important to ignore.

Give them what they want.

Every issue of your newsletter should be relevant to your niche. In many cases, this will mean segmenting your list and sending different mailings based on individual preferences.

Readers who have responded to a particular article in the past can be segmented from the non-responders; people who have clicked a particular ad can be sent a follow up notice; etc.

Test your newsletter with many configurations.

Get multiple email accounts for testing purposes. Test in different browsers, different email clients, mobile devices, etc. Yes, it's time consuming, but this IS your business we're talking about.

If you can't take the time to ensure your newsletter looks professional, how can your readers trust you will take the time with your services?

Test your newsletter without your graphics.

The majority of email clients have images turned off by default. Make sure your newsletter makes without the graphics. Never rely on an image to relay the message.

Get to the point quickly.

There are thousands of email newsletters and online sources vying for your reader's attention. Respect your subscribers' time, be succinct, say what you need to say and move on.

Don't delete your links too soon.

If your newsletter provides great content (which it should) your readers will save it and refer to it later. I'm always amazed when I see links being clicked six weeks after an issue was sent.

Leave your landing pages up and--especially if you have advertisers in your newsletter--track your metrics for several weeks into the future.

Don't be afraid to ask for the sale.

And provide multiple opportunities for your readers to respond. It's true that your newsletter needs to provide valuable content and build a relationship with your readers, but you also need to pay your bills.

After all, you're running a business, and your newsletter is strictly a vehicle for marketing your business and highlighting your expertise.

When advertising a product or service in your newsletter, be sure to include multiple links of different types. Some readers will click the images, some will click the headlines, some will click body copy.

Believe it or not, some readers will actually get insulted and even complain when you try to sell something. But don't worry about them. They only want the freebies and have very little respect for you or your talents; they are definitely not your ideal customer.

Stay up to date with industry regulations and best practices. Spam filters are constantly changing, ISP regulations are constantly changing, new email clients are being introduced; it's important to stay on top of these changes to ensure deliver ability, readability and compliance.

Article Source: http://bytepowered.org/articles

Karen Scharf is an Indianapolis marketing consultant who works with small business owners and entrepreneurs. She offers several whitepapers, free reports and checklists, including her FREE Can-Spam checklist and FREE email pre-flight checklist to ensure your emails get delivered, get opened and get read. Download your copies at www.ModernImage.com.

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