Tips for Effective Newsletter Marketing
Email is still by far the major means of communication despite the rise in Social Media. The irony is obvious when you have to authenticate your Facebook, Linkedin or Twitter account using an email id.
Experts vouch for the sales figures provided by effective email marketing campaigns. Newsletters are an effective way to keep in touch with your customers.
Obvious benefits
- A Newsletter serves as a channel to keep in touch and communicate special offers or provide valuable information to the readers.
- It is cost-effective as compared to print and other media in reaching out to customers.
- Newsletter campaigns are easy to track and with the right tools add to your knowledgebase about customers.
- A sales cycle can effectively be shortened with the help of newsletters.
- With today’s email marketing tools, newsletters can be highly customized to specific market segments
Important tips for executing a successful newsletter campaign
Newsletter Design
It is important to get your newsletter design right. One important thing to remember is that email reading interfaces are not upto the mark when it comes to the latest HTML and CSS standards. Old school HTML has to be extensively relied upon, including the element most hated in modern web design, HTML Tables.
Emails have to look good in desktop clients like MS-Outlook as well as web mail such as Gmail, Yahoo and Hotmail/Live. So, testing your template is important.
Call to Action and Landing Page
The Call to action has to be placed prominently without being too intrusive. Add a copy of your newsletter as a landing page at your website. There will be situations where the newsletter does not render correctly so the user can be redirected to the page.
Use images judiciously as too many images or tiny filler images can trigger spam filters.
Monitoring your campaign
Regular reports help in tracking the progress of a newsletter campaign. With an advanced email campaign tool, you can easily track
- Number of emails delivered to recipients
- Number of emails bounced i.e. did not reach the recipient. These can be hard bounces (rejected by server) or soft bounces (user email id is changed or does not exist)
- Number of subscribers who opened the newsletter.
- How many clicked on the links in your newsletter.
Consistency
Newsletter campaigns should be delivered on a consistent basis, so most of your subscribers are expecting them. This includes frequency, date and time of delivery.
Following the above tips should help make newsletters an important part of your online marketing strategy.