How to write effective email newsletters

Writing effective email newsletters as a marketing means to generate more traffic is hardly the secret of the century but is often overlooked as being just spam. I receive about 50 newsletters a day in my inbox and most are unread and without even going past the subject line, are deleted. So how can a newsletter be not only effective but have the ability to avoid the dreaded junk folder.

Email newsletters come in two formats. The webpage clone or the plain text version. The webpage clone is an exact or close copy of the company’s webpage to impress the reader and engage them in reading the text or buying a product. The second is function only. It gets the content out there but as it looks fairly boring, people tend to ignore it. Although some sales newsletters can be quite engaging especially if it has a catchy title and not ‘monthly newsletter’.

If the title and subject are personal the recipient is more likely to open it. Keeping it informal through design and language adds to grabbing the reader’s attention.

Adding interactivity to a newsletter can work well such as video, audio, SitePal, podcasting or a voting poll, you want people to either buy something or direct them to your site in order to buy something so engage them first then tempt them with the goods.

If you are bulk emailing, try out options such as SendBlaster who offer a free and paid version. Of course there is Outlook, this does involve organising your own subscriber list. Our good old friends Google groups again have not failed to be included in as much as possible, they have set-up a tool to create a list of unlimited people to send emails.

Hosted mass emailing companies are set-up for exactly this purpose. They have the most flexibility and allow creation of lists, opt out of subscribers,spam filters and generation of reports. GraphicMail offer a free with advertising version for 5000 emails, plus template generators.

There are numerous resources both free, open source and paid that can meet most requirements and engage the customer’s interest. If you know of any more or have tried any, let us know.