Marketing with an Email Newsletter – Part 1

Email newsletters are a cost-effective and efficient way to keep clients coming back.  Email newsletters are a great tool to stay “first in mind” with your clients as it allows you to have repetitive contacts in an unobtrusive way.   You can design, customize and publish your newsletter yourself, or if you don’t think you have the skills to design and distribute a newsletter, most web designers can find a system to fit your needs.

It’s important to know a few things about email marketing before sending out your first email newsletter.

First, you must be careful about sending out a mass email because it is possible to be blacklisted by internet service providers.  When you send one email out to a large list, systems can pick this up and consider it spam.  If you are blacklisted, you can be blocked from sending emails to certain recipients or even have your email blocked altogether.  The easiest way to avoid this is to use a company that specializes in email marketing and use their system to send the emails out.  A few services with good reputations are: Constant Contact, Vertical Response, iContact, or eCampaignPro (which is designed for real estate agents).

Second, make sure your emails can be read through any email client.  Most email clients (such as Outlook, Gmail, or Yahoo) keep images turned off as a default.  This means that if your email contains information in the form of images, it will not be seen.  Make sure important headlines or information is in the text of the email, not in the pictures.

Lastly, send your email newsletter at the right time.  Half of the people that normally read their email during the week will not read their email on the weekend.  The best time to send emails is in the middle of the week (Tuesday/Wednesday/Thursday) and during normal business hours (try between 10am and 5pm).

Check back next week for part 2 of this topic.  We we will go over ideas for your newsletters as well as how exactly to implement your newsletter campaign.