Email Newsletters

What are your options?

You want to keep your clients or customers abreast of your latest news. To reach a large audience in the past you might have mailed newsletters or postcards. With the advent of the Internet, your options have now widened. When you want to reach out to your audience, the first question to ask is whether you want to “push” or “pull” the information to your customers.

In the “pull” scenario your audience voluntarily comes to you. For example, to learn about your latest sale, news, or event, your audience visits your store or website. Ideally this is on a regular basis. However I’m going to leave “pull” marketing strategies to another blog. In this article, I’m going to focus on “push” strategies. In “push” marketing you send information to your audience. There is no effort on their part to receive this information. In the past, the most popular form of push marketing was direct mailings. Now with the Internet, email marketing has become both cost and time effective, however there are some options to consider first.

Direct emails from your personal email program may be the easiest method but may not be the most effective. The first and biggest problem is if enough people tag your emails as “spam”, your entire email system may become blacklisted from sending emails to Gmail, Yahoo, AOL, etc. Second, personal email programs are not designed to handle rich emails that are compatible with different email readers. The email you draft may look good initially, but becomes a scrambled mess when read through different programs. Third, your personal email program is not designed to handle and resolve sending errors and bad addresses.

If you’re going to regularly send emails to a large audience, the better solution is to use a mass email program or service. “Newsletter” or “mass email” services are companies that specialize in helping you create newsletters to email. They manage your recipient list, templates, and even report statistics about readership.  These services hide most of the technical stuff and give you clear options in helping you design and deliver your newsletters.  The two most popular services are iContact and Constant Contact.  iContact is the cheaper of the two, but otherwise, there’s not much difference between the two.

I’ll talk about mass emailing programs in another blog.  But to jump to the conclusion, my overall recommendation is this:

• If you have 50 or more recipients and/or send out emails at least once a month, consider a mass emailing service or program.
• If you’re a techie, try phplist, a free mailing list applet you install on a web server.
• If you’re comfortable installing software, consider a mass emailing program.
• If your time is limited and/or technology scares you, then consider iContact.

Further Information

• MXToolBox - Test to see if your mail server has been blacklisted.
• Spamhaus - Provides an “official” definition of what spam is.
• Constant Contact - Mass email / newsletter service.
• iContact - Mass email / newsletter service.