10 tips for designing email newsletters that earn their keep

30 Mar

Many small businesses are starting to realise how important it is to keep in touch with their customers and that one easy, low-cost way to do this is by sending email newsletters. However, many newsletters fall short when it comes to meeting legal requirements, attracting users to take action and providing feedback to the business. Here are some tips to help you create newsletters that give back.

Be concise: The point of a newsletter is to give your client short teasers whether they be articles, promotions or news. Keep each section short and sweet and if there is more to tell, link to a website with the deeper information.
Give your readers something: Avoid sending out a newsletter that simply gives them an update on your business; give them reason to click through to your website – whether to find out more information, view more specials, or download a coupon.
Use a mixture of images and text: Plain text newsletters can be dry (though you should allow them as an alternative), whereas image-heavy newsletters (or image-only newsletters) can be hard to read and do not allow for obvious hyperlinks. Keep information in text with images for illustration and use hyperlinks to take take your readers to your website.
Give a summary of the newsletter: Some campaign software allows you to generate a list of links that click through to the different paragraphs within your newsletter, giving a clear summary of its contents – for readers who want to know what your pushing, and fast.
Include a link to view the newsletter online: Just in case they can’t or choose not to view it in their email client. Many campaign tools allow this automatically.
Use software which provides tracking: Knowing who viewed your newsletter, who clicked links (and which ones) and which emails bounced can be valuable information for drawing conclusions about the success of your campaigns
Always include a working unsubscribe link: otherwise you are sending SPAM and that’s BAD.
Consider adding a “Forward to a friend” link – it may be easy for readers to forward an email but this prompts them to do so and it may end up generating you more sales.
Proof-read: proof-read, proof-read and get a friend to proof-read again. It can’t hurt your credibility.
Test: Make sure your email newsletter works in the majority of email clients including MS Outlook, Outlook Express, Thunderbird, Apple Mail. Hotmail, Gmail, iPhone.

Also, a reminder: you must have permission from your recipients to send them mass communications and the content must be relevant to them – consider setting up multiple subscriber lists for different kinds of communications.

In case you’re wondering which software I use or where you can find something that meets all of these suggestions, I highly recommend Campaign Monitor. It has a sensible pricing system, great features (templates with rich-text editing, fantastic reporting), a range of payment options and is easy to use. An alternative that looks just as good, with different pricing options is MailChimp.