The newsletter
This month's content:
Definition
A newsletter is a mail or e-mail letter sent regularly to subscribers. Composed of texts, graphics, illustrations, hyperlinks to your web site, its content can be, for instance, a selection of products, an article about new events or products for your business or company.
The newsletter is a good tool to retain and to establish your customer’s loyalty.
There are at least 3 good reasons for you to send a newsletter:
- Inform your customers of company news
- Maintain a regular contact with your clients
- Increase your web site traffic by encouraging subscribers to visit it
Choose an e-mailing service
Very often, small companies, with a small list of customers, use their messaging service (Outlook, Thunderbird, Eudora ...) to send their e-mails. These tools are not really suited for this type of service (no tracking or follow-up, no statistics, no predefined newsletter’s template, etc.)
Furthermore, this way involves some risks not to ignore ...
- Your ISP (Internet Service Provider) could close your account
- You could be considered as spamming
- You loose time in the management of returned requests
The most interesting mailing services are :
- Sarbacane
- PopList
- PG-Mailing List PRO
- Constant Contact
- Etc.
If you do not wish to learn the HTML language and want to use a ready-made templates system, with which you simply copy/paste your text, we recommend ConstantContact (in English). This service provides the automatic management of subscribers (the subscribers can also unsubscribe and/or change their e-mail address themselves), as well as the customization of your return pages (registration, unsubscribe, change, thank you mails...).
There is also some software you can install on your computer (such as Sarbacane, which also provides some templates). There are often free versions of these software, which in return of this free use display the logo of the service used at the bottom of each e-mail sent. But be careful with these software: if you experience a power outage or a disruption in the reception of your Internet services whilst you are sending your newsletter, many software will automatically resend the complete newsletter batch once the situation has resumed to a normal state. For instance, a disruption in the middle of sending your newsletter can result in the first half of your recipients receiving the newsletter twice.
You can also use free online services such as PopList (in French), which allows to send quickly and easily a large number of e-mails. However, there is no models management and you must import your own template(s).
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Create the newletter's model
A model is a page’s template, ready-to-use, reusable for each newsletter, in which you only need to insert its text and its content. Your model could simply be a page with your logo and some pictures. You may have as well, at the bottom of the page, your signature, your contact details, and especially the link to unsubscribe to the newsletter.
NB: Do not copy/paste your text from a Microsoft® Word document directly into an HTML editor (this is a tool that allows you to create your model/template directly in the HTML coding language) : you might risk seeing strange characters such as "éèâ€". Instead, copy the text from a text editor such as Notepad that you can find in your computer’s programs under : Start -> Programs ->Accessories ->Notepad.
This operation involves two basic steps:
- To choose the newsletter’s format.
- To create your model using a specific software.
In the text formatting case, the newsletter looks like a conventional e-mail. With the HTML formatting, the newsletters are more eye-catching, they can include images, hyperlinks, formatted text (using colors, fonts and effects such as bold, italics,...) and they can adhere to the graphical chart of your web site.
To create yourself a more sophisticated template, web’s creation and design software are necessary. Some are free (such as NVU, an open-source and free-of-charge software from the Mozilla Foundation), whilst others are sold (license fee, e.g. Adobe® Dreamweaver®).
But you always have one last option: either use the pre-defined templates from your e-mailing and client messaging services or have your template designed and realized by the Keonnected’s Team, according to your ideas and graphical chart, for only CHF 139.- (contact us)
According to a recent study, nearly 98% of the respondents mentioned that they are regularly disappointed with the content and/or the design of newsletters. In order to attract people and make them want to read your newsletter, 3 criterions must be followed :
• The design has to be pleasant and nice: you cannot expect your readers to read a newsletter with a botched model that «hurts the eyes».
• It must be also evocative: it should immediately remind your web site.
• Finally, your design must not be completely identical but requires a sustained follow-up: your newsletter need not be absolutely similar in every respect to the previous one; however, it must respect its ideas and the main outline.
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Create the newsletter's content
Experts cannot stress enough that a newsletter is not an advertisement. The newsletter must have a real content, and bring an added-value to your readers. Nobody will sign up for a newsletter and take the time to read it regularly only to see advertisements.
In a customer panel selected by Altice, nearly all respondents often feel disappointed by the newsletters they receive. In over 50% of the cases, users spend less than 40 seconds to read the newsletter.
Thus, this is very important to build your content step by step and carefully.
The purpose of the message must be short and have a selling point:
Avoid titles like "Newsletter No. 5" or "Newsletter from the XYZ Company". Choose a title that reflects the content of your newsletter and encourages the reader to read it. For example: "10 Tips to Increase Your Productivity", "€10 Free Voucher", "Free contest", "Subscription’s fees offered", etc.
The content must be short, structured (with titles and sub-titles) and completed by hyperlinks back to your web site:
A person’s attention to a newsletter is often very limited, given the large number of e-mails, information and advertising received each and every day. .
Structure the newsletter with informative titles and sub-titles. Prefer short texts instead of lengthy content for a quick and enjoyable reading.
Add hyperlinks that redirect the reader who wants to learn more to your web site.
Avoid too many illustrations and make sure they are not too heavy:
Some e-mailing services offer to host your images on their servers. If this is not the case, an image that is to be displayed in the newsletter received by the recipient, must be present on your web site or online on an another site.
To insert an image into your newsletter, you must specify the URL (the address) of this image (in order that readers do not see only a blank square with a small red cross at the top left).
Avoid adding too many images: your newsletter risks going directly to the recycle bin (trash) without being read, if the loading time is too long.
You can suggest as well to the users to receive your newsletter in text format (or a link redirecting to your web site if they cannot display/read your newsletter).
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Send the newsletter, track deliveries and follow-up
Once your newsletter is ready, there are 3 key questions to ask to yourself:
To whom should I send the newsletter?
To customers, partners and potential clients. To all those who are your contacts and most importantly, who agreed to receive the newsletter. On your web site, add a heading such as "Subscribe to the newsletter", where users can leave their e-mail address (on the web site home page for example).
NB: In the case you decide to send a newsletter focused on a very specific topic, for only a portion of your audience, and outside the usual frequency of sending e-mails, then mention adequately and well in evidence that this communication is not the usual newsletter.
How to increase the subscription’s rate?
Encourage the inclusion of new users, by adding, for example, a hyperlink at the end of the newsletter, such as “Send to a friend."
Communicate and promote your newsletter: remind it in your e-mails, on your bills, in putting the previous newsletters online on your web site.
How to avoid the newsletter being considered as spam?
By obtaining the consent of the recipient (“opt-in”): do not send your newsletter to recipients without their prior consent and do not send too many e-mails from your e-mail address.
By sending the newsletter at regular intervals. In a recent study, it has been demonstrated that 2 intervals are preferred: weekly and monthly and preferably to have the newsletter sent in the evening, which is considered a right time to read it.
By creating a simple HTML newsletter: avoid too many scripts, too many images, too many CSS styles (cascading style sheets, which results in many unnecessary flourishes).
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Legal obligations
If respecting and following the rules of marketing promotion is nowadays a must for a newsletter to be delivered and read by its recipient, they are no longer sufficient.
Indeed, blocking and filtering carried downstream can impact negatively many of your efforts. That phenomenon has a name: the false positives. It means that e-mails from authorized editors, following the rules of the opt-in, will be, wrongly, blocked or filtered.
According to Return Path, it affects 18 to 20% of e-mails sent in the United States by renowned companies.
Also, be aware that spam is illegal: among the legal texts that are in force in Switzerland : The law on Informatics and Freedoms ; The law on Confidence in the Digital Economy ; The Consumer’s Code and the Regulation on Data Protection in the context of Electronic Submissions ; (Official documents titles in French : La loi sur l'informatique et les libertés; La loi pour la confiance dans l'économie numérique ; Le code de la consommation ; La directive sur la protection des données dans le cadre des envois électroniques).
The web site of the Swiss Confederation (The Federal Data Protection Office- in French : Le Préposé Fédéral à la Protection des Données - PFPD) provides a summary of the current legislations in force.
Here are three key points to optimize your newsletter strategy:
- Blocking: pay great attention to rejected or blocked e-mails
Blocked e-mails is due to three parameters:
The first is the authentication of the IP address (identifying the computer connected to the Internet). It is absolutely necessary that this IP address has a “positive” history, that is that non-valid addresses are removed and that complaints about previous e-mailing are duly and rapidly processed and closed.
The overall “health” of your e-mails files is then crucial, as spammers are known to not follow this basic rule.
To accomplish this, the publishers of the newsletters or their routing providers must be directly in contact with the ISP (Internet Service Providers) and the web mails publishers, in order to develop and implement automated systems enabling them to collect and escalate back complaints, denied or rejected e-mails.
- Filtering: Check the HTML code
An another possible obstacle in the correct delivery of newsletters: filtering; this means that an authorized e-mail is being redirected automatically, by a filtering engine, to an special inbox named "Spam" or "Junk" (or “Junk mail”).
To prevent this to happen, it is useful, similarly to the blocking issue, to check your IP address history, and also the content of the e-mail itself. Indeed, it may be quite similar and looking close compared to those commonly used by spammers in the aspects of the ratio of text vs. images, the fonts and/or the words and styles used.
The best practice and a "must have" is to ask your subscribers to register the newsletter’s or the sender’s name in their addresses book or to the authorized and trusted e-mail addresses list, an action that will avoid unwanted filters and the potential blocking of the images.
- Be prepared for the new versions of e-mail clients messaging services
The world of e-mailing is not immovable!
Many innovations and developments are underway and will impact the Internet user’s practices as well as the ratios for opened and delivered messages.
The first of these is the generalization of the Webmail’s windows previews. This is a new function that implies rethinking completely the upper part of the newsletters to render and make them more attractive. With this in mind, visual displays at the top of newsletters can be an attractive solution.
But we must take into account the blocking of images that seems to be a practice that is already widespread and will certainly be generalized. To avoid this problem, it is possible to insert, above the visual display, texts hyperlinks that would allow Internet users to still see the newsletter from the preview window. Nowadays, this practice is common in the United States.
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