How to Send an E-mail Newsletter Your Customers Will Love

The Internet is overflowing with poorly executed email marketing newsletters. Here’s advice on how to create a newsy marketing communication that people continue to open and actually read.

We’ve all gotten them. Some of us, to our vexation and bewilderment, have produced them: email marketing newsletters that fail to keep recipients opening and clicking over time.

According to Forrester Research, eight out of 10 broadband users delete most commercial email without reading it, and six out of 10 say most email doesn’t offer them anything interesting. With email users’ time and inbox space increasingly at a premium, and patience wearing thin, how can marketers stay in customers’ good graces and ensure that their newsletters are continuously and eagerly anticipated?

Be the friend in the “from” field

The relentless assault of spam has changed how people approach their inboxes. Today, it’s not your offer, but your reputation, that matters most to email recipients. Research shows that the number-one factor influencing people to open an email today is knowing and trusting the sender, followed by an intriguing subject line. Presuming you have done everything to ensure a recipient wants your newsletter–that is, you’ve obtained permission, and are sending only relevant communications at an appropriate frequency–using your company name in the “from” field and in the subject line will help recipients to recognize your messages, and increase the chance that your email will be opened and read.

Adhere to your regularly scheduled programming

Be sure to tell recipients at sign-up when they can expect your newsletter to arrive in their email inbox–and then stick to your schedule. Timing is targeting, and if your newsletter arrives only sporadically, customers will forget all about you and move on to other things. At the very least, they will cease opening your emails. But if enough time elapses between issues, they may even complain to their ISP because they don’t remember signing up.

Tailor content to recipients

Ultimately the most important thing in email marketing is the notion of relevance. And key to relevance is personalized content. Industry figures show that email marketers who tailor their content to specific recipients achieve consistently higher open and click-through rates than marketers who send the same message to everyone.

To avoid the one-size-fits-all feel in your newsletters, ask customers about their interests when they first sign up. Then, segment your list so that recipients get the specific email content they say they are most interested in. For pre-existing subscribers, you can send a survey asking what content they’d most like to receive from you.

Toot your horn softly

In the search for improved ROI, email marketers must strike a delicate balance between their mission to market brand and product, and their customers’ acute sensitivity to receiving unwanted, irrelevant messages. Subscribers to email newsletters want actual news, not advertisements disguised as newsletters. Recipients also want to know that you value their privacy and will not share their data with others.

Give your readers things to do

Make your newsletter even more interesting and useful by making it interactive. You can add relevant polls, quizzes and contests, and links to sign up for white papers, studies and seminars as well as your most popular previous content. Not only will customers find your newsletter more engaging, you can use the information and insight you gather from their behavior to create even more highly relevant content going forward.

Keep it short and simple

Online readers prefer short copy to dense walls of text. So keep content simple, direct and targeted. Newsletter copy should consist of short statements or paragraphs and bulleted text in an easy-to-read, sans-serif font such as Arial, Tahoma or Verdana, in size 10-point or better. Dark text on a light background is easier to read, as is boldface rather than capitalized, underlined or italicized text for emphasis. You can avoid a wordy, text-heavy appearance by offering short and enticing lead-ins to stories and inviting readers to click links to continue, and by using graphical content such as photos, charts and tables to guide the eye in place of text.

Avoid landing in the spam or junk folder

Delivery provider Pivotal Veracity reports that as many as one in five permission-based emails are mistakenly filtered as spam. When email newsletters wind up in spam or junk folders, it’s because they exhibit characteristics frequently seen in spam: a ratio of too much HTML to text–spammers often use HTML to “hide” words that trip spam filters–and messy HTML code.

To avoid being mistakenly filtered as spam, use a content checker such as SpamAssassin, and make sure your HTML is squeaky clean by running it through a markup validation service such as http://validator.w3.org/. You also want to send your email from a dedicated IP address that no other mailer uses. That way, your deliverability cannot be negatively affected if another sender sharing your IP is blocked or blacklisted.

Email’s unique ability to drive direct response and cultivate online relationships makes it an invaluable tool in every marketer’s arsenal. As recipients dodge an ever-increasing flurry of useless messages and ISPs continuing to aggressively filter email deemed as spam, email marketers who make relevance their number-one priority while striving for high deliverability will continue to flourish in this exciting, ever-changing channel.

Elaine O’Gorman is vice president of strategy for Silverpop.