In today’s modern digital climate, the email marketing formula is well established and used by many worldwide financial, public sector and private businesses. HTML or ‘rich graphic’ emails deliver a powerful and professional message with strong incentives that are a fantastic way to maintain repeated contact with your customers and prospects.

Rather than inundate you with a list of things to do and don’t, we’ll simply give you our “Top 5 Email Newsletter Disasters”.

Don’t try any of these at home, folks…

With the high prevalence of spam (unwanted email) these days, people are very sensitive about their email addresses getting ‘out there’ and also, depending on the topic of your newsletter, your readers may not be comfortable being identified in a list of email addresses. Likewise, many Internet Service Providers are becoming ever more concerned about being blacklisted as a source of spam and so may prevent you, or your individual IP address, from transmitting the email in the first place. Get yourselves or your ISP banned and it can be a painstaking task to get off the list.

Instead, use a reputable email broadcast house to deliver your newsletter. These are approved ‘whitelist’ suppliers and can safely transmit your email whilst at the same time masking the address of you and, more importantly, your recipients. Although it’s never going to be as cheap as emailing them out yourself, in our opinion the positive factors more than outweigh the negative in terms of increased reliability, security and the many data list management and online campaign reporting facilities available at your fingertips through the broadcast house’s own website.

With users spending more time these days deleting unwanted email from their inbox, their patience is getting pretty thin when they receive email they didn’t ask for or don’t want any more. And not responding to an unsubscription request, well, that’s frankly just poor customer service. Have you ever heard that people will tell more people about a bad customer service experience than they will a good one? Don’t have them talking about you, please.

By using a broadcast house to distribute your email, they can usually provide a facility to allow users to unsubscribe from your distribution list and keep it nice and clean. It’s all done online, automatically, and you need never be troubled by an unsubscription request again.

People aren’t stupid. They’ll soon see through your thinly-veiled attempts to hide your shameless promotion, and then they’ll resent that you tried to sneak it past them whilst they weren’t looking. People are getting increasingly tired of being sold to, be it on the telephone in the evening, while they’re casually strolling down the high street or when they’ve been led to believe they’ll be reading an innocent newsletter.

Instead, why not come clean and tell it like it is? If you’re going to be sending out promotions and offers, make sure when users sign up that they know they’ll be receiving this type of email from you and give those campaigns appropriate subject lines. Alternatively, include your promotion in your newsletters by all means, but give the reader a useful article or information as well and not just a hard sell.

The cardinal sin. Always check your email by sending it to yourself and then make sure you check every referenced image and website address contained within. When your links are incomplete, incorrect, or unclickable, it’s annoying to the user who wanted to find out more. It might even send them away forever. As a hint always use absolute URLs (beginning with http://) and make sure any images that you may want to use are located on a live webserver and not on your local hard drive. This will prevent the email sending the images as attached files which can trigger a user’s anti-virus software or firewall into blocking your email.

A broadcast house will generally allow you to send test emails free of charge in both HTML and plain text formats so that you can check that they work across a wide variety of platforms and email software before committing to final transmission.

Imagine flagging down a total stranger in the street and trying to engage them in conversation about your fantastic new service or product and then not letting them get away. Chances are they won’t like it. Chances are they’ll get annoyed. Possibly they may even call the police (but besides, that was a long time ago and the case was eventually dropped). The point is, you wouldn’t do it in real life so why do it on the Internet? Only send your newsletter to recipients, or previous clients or customers, who’ve specifically asked for it.

If you’re really struggling for addresses then lists can readily be bought from data management companies who can supply legitimate lists of people who’ve signed up to receive information from companies in your chosen specialist area or who match your target demographic profile. Don’t be tempted to make up your own lists by scouring the Internet for email addresses or obtaining lists from email harvesting software. ISPs and spam prevention companies are now placing spam ‘traps’ on the Internet (fake email addresses) to catch out the unsuspecting punter and alert them to unsolicited emails sent to those addresses. Send your newsletter to one of these and prepare yourself for a whole world of hurt…

Regular email campaigns can be a fantastic way of engaging with your customers and potential clients but only if performed in a responsible manner. At Studio North we can assist you at every stage of your online campaign, from sourcing clean data lists and brainstorming the overall strategy, to producing stunning creative that works first time, every time. Not only that, but our links with one of the UK’s top email broadcast houses means that we can transmit your campaign with maximum efficiency and security and then give you a final report to let you know how well it was received.

So don’t let your next newsletter get bounced – contact us now to discuss your requirements.

Tags: email, html, marketing, newsletters, spam

This entry was posted on Monday, February 23rd, 2009 at 12:58 PM and is filed under Opinion. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.