7 Tips for Creating an Effective Email Newsletter

Before you start ... get permission.

Email newsletters should be permission based, meaning that ONLY people who subscribe to your newsletter receive it. They have given you permission to engage in this form of communication with them.

Without permission, your newsletter is spam.

And nobody likes spam.

Once you’ve got permission, here are 7 tips for creating an effective email newsletter.

1. Avoid the Bcc field. Regular email clients—like Outlook, Lotus Notes, Gmail—are not set up to handle bulk newsletter distribution. If you are sending your email newsletter through your regular email client, you run the risk of being flagged as a spammer. Use a dedicated email service like Campaign Monitor or Constant Contact.
   
   
2. Pay attention to the “From”. Use your full name in the “from” email or sender address and a personal email address rather than a generic info@ address. You want to habituate people to recognizing your name. People are less likely to delete a message from a recognized sender.
   
   
3. Avoid spammy subject lines. Subject lines that include words commonly used by spammers, such as “Catch up”, “Let’s chat”, “Free” or “50% Discount”, get deleted right away.
   
   
4. Write subject lines that are specific and descriptive. A blank subject line means nothing. A descriptive subject line, such as “7 Tips for Winter-proofing Your Home”, tells people exactly what to expect in the newsletter and acts as an enticement to open the email right away.
   
   
5. Include a call to action. If you are selling something, ask for the sale. Include a “Buy Now” link. If you want to drive traffic to your site, include links and explain the benefit of visiting the site. Answer this question: What do you want people to do after reading your newsletter? Once you know the answer, make sure you include a call to action that attracts that result.
   
   
6. Be brief, be brilliant, be gone. Concise, memorable messages are preferred over long blocks of text. Make every word count. You want people to open your email right away, not save it for later, or delete it because the “saved” messages have piled up.
   
   
7. Test, test, test. If you are sending out HTML newsletters, make sure that your template works across common email clients. What looks good in your version of Outlook, might not look good in my email client. Mail Chimp has a good resource center and a great article on Stupid HTML Email Design Mistakes.
   
   

Have a tip to add? Share it in the comments.

Email Marketing for Business-to-Business Customers

Email marketing—what do you think of it?

I have a negative attitude towards real spam (enlargements, pills, mortgages) and perceived spam (marketing messages I have not asked to receive). At the same time, I love the newsletters that I subscribe to.

Although I subscribe to these sites’ RSS feeds, I also like the email reminders and prompts to visit their sites, where I can download content or look at related articles.

My email is open all the time, which is why, in some cases, I prefer email to RSS.

Here’s a short list of email newsletters I received today:

• MarketingProfs Daily Fix newsletter
• Future Now’s GrokDotCom newsletter
• Guerrilla Marketing weekly newsletter

I like these newsletters because they are directly related to my business. Now, if I was in the business of re-selling these companies’ services or if I was a retailer selling a product, I’d appreciate timely sales information from the companies whose services and products I was selling—information that would help my business.

Do you have a regular newsletter that you offer to your service providers, vendors, retailers? Do you receive a regular newsletter from a company whose products or services you sell? Please add to the comments any tips or anecdotes about the things that work well in these b2b newsletters. Tell us what you like or dislike.

Why am I asking?

Because selling cycles are interesting beasts. For many companies, you sell-in your products to re-sellers, who in turns sell your products through to the end consumer. You want to optimize both sell-in and sell-through. In some cases, a b2b (business-to-business) email newsletter can help you do that. But aside from a gut feeling about the benefits of b2b newsletters, what do we know?

Paul Dunay at MarketingProfs recently posted some stats regarding b2b newsletters. These were presented at the MarketingProfs Conference in October 2007 and reported in the MarketingProfs Daily Fix newsletter:

• The percentage of professionals who sign up for email offers was higher than I would have thought - 85%. (source: Return Path)
• The increase in purchase value of email subscribers vs. non subscribers was 17%. That means, on average, the email subscriber bought 17% more! (source: Forrester)
• How much more likely is a B2B subscriber to consider email “spam” if it comes “too frequently”? The answer was twice as likely. That’s daunting, and it means you need to think about the cadence of your emails! (source: MarketingSherpa)

Find out how many subscribers read email newsletters on their mobile phone and other b2b email stats ...

What do you think about these numbers? Are they reflective of your own experiences?

Post a comment. Tell us what you think of b2b email newsletters.