Sending your customers an email newsletter is possibly the cheapest and most effective way to market your services and build audiences. If you have a limited marketing budget, an email newsletter should be at the top of your to-do list. It can help you get eyeballs on your brand, send news and information to your customers and drive traffic to your website.

‘The seven deadly sins of email marketing management’ outlines the major pitfalls to avoid if you want to keep your newsletter subscribers happy. Some key things to remember are to keep your design simple and your messages relevant. Link through to your website for more information. Encourage subscribers to forward the newsletter and provide a link so that new people can subscribe.

Using a good email tool can make all the difference. It can help you identify bounces (email addresses that are no longer active), manage your list of contacts and monitor open rates for your newsletter. Data on the links in your newsletter that have been clicked on gives you opportunity to adapt newsletter content to meet your subsribers’ needs and interests.

The graph shows typical open rates for email newsletters for different sectors (click on the image to see a bigger version!). The larger your email list, the lower the open rate. Smaller lists tend to be more personal and users are more connected to the sender.

The graph is provided by the folks at Campaign Monitor. We’re fortunate to use their email marketing tool for our newsletters at NZLive - our designers have set up templates for us to streamline the process. One of reasons we like Campaign Monitor is that they provide excellent support and tips on making your email marketing campaign successful. Whether you use their service or not - check out their blog for lots more great information.

If anyone else has an email marketing tool to recommend, let us know.

There are plenty of great email newsletters out there, but here’s a couple that turn up in my inbox. The Artists Alliance newsletter is a little beauty - nothing fancy, no images, but excellent copy, including a summary of items at the beginning, followed by headings and item abstracts with links through to their website. The City Gallery in Wellington has a very swept-up newsletter that uses strong images to bring their new exhibitions to life. Different solutions for different needs.

This entry was posted on Thursday, May 10th, 2007 at 2:23 pm and is filed under Marketing, Technology. 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.