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The Five Factors to Creating Effective Newsletters

E-mail users are inundated with messages, and even when the user has opted in with permission to receive your e-mail, blatant self-promoting advertisements are often viewed by customers as SPAM, and may be treated the same way - with disdain and their trusty Delete Key. One truth to keep in mind about unwanted, useless e-mail messages is that recipients need far less effort to get rid of them than they need to throw away a print direct mail piece or to hang up on an annoying telemarketer making the same unwanted useless phone call. When done incorrectly, a bad e-mail campaign can not only produce a poor ROI, but also alienate good customers and possibly turn them away from your business for good.

To achieve a mutually beneficial communications model, five fundamental rules are critical to follow. Combined, these rules will guide you to create effective, purposeful e-mail messages that your customers are more likely to open, read, appreciate and respect, rather than neglect or delete.

The Five Steps in Creating Effective E-mail Newsletters:

Simple And Clear
Meaningful
Call to Action
Trackable
Loyalty

Keep it Simple

Considering the fact the most e-mail users receive tens to hundreds of emails messages each day, the most important goal of your e-mail message should be that it is easy for people to receive and read. You only have seconds for people look at and evaluate your message - the simpler and clearer the better.

Keep your email simple, short, and honest. Your content must be simple to read, straightforward, and to the point. E-mails packed with verbose articles, chock full of advertising, or overloaded with hyperlinks to outside web sites are likely to be perceived as blatantly self-serving on the part of the sender.

If you are using HTML emails, as many people do now, they should look professional and have a similar look and feel to your companies website. A general rule for HTML emails is not use too many font or colors. HTML emails can be formatted to be easier to read, using bullets, bold, underlining, and other elements.

Keep your email short, which saves on the use of their bandwidth. If you really need to get more information to your subscribers/customers then you can direct them to your website, or even better, create a landing page that has a specific message to your readers.

Do not send attachments or rich media such as Flash or Applets. Readers often see these as potential viruses. Some email programs cannot view rich media or video. Yahoo and Hotmail block all rich media. Even more, some companies will entirely block your email if these items are in your email. Embedded or linked images with the email are perfectly fine. Try not to use too many images, and any one image should not be over 10k in size. Including too many images can dramatically increase the download time of your readers.

Make Your Message Meaningful

It is easy to let your messages become heavily loaded vehicles to promote your product or service. Today's customers are too savvy for self-promotion that does not contain objective, useful information. People today want information of value, or content that is personally meaningful to the recipient. This is what sets your email apart from typical SPAM.

Ideally, it would appear that your best shot at creating a successful e-mail campaign would therefore be to pursue a nicely designed HTML e-newsletter (that can also be delivered in plain text). In each newsletter, your content might include a mix of items:

Short articles about your products or services
Profiles and success stories from your customers
Tips and tricks of your trade
News updates
Analysis of trends in your field
Event announcements of interest
Advertisements about your company
Special promotions or coupons

Call to Action

Each and every email should contain an action item for the reader to follow. This could be as simple as creating a link to your site or a landing page. It could be a phone number or a person to call. You could ask them to fill out a survey or register for a contest. At the very least encourage people to reply to your message.

It is likely that you will need to test the waters to find the right balance of the three goals above for your business. It may be that you will need to adjust and readjust the proportion of each goal you put forth in your e-newsletters, as measured by the amount of space you devote to content versus advertising / coupons / promotion. You will also want to experiment with the effort and cost you expend to create content that is so well written that your customers will want to keep it and/or forward it to others.

Tracking

Track Every Action
This is the best way to test how successful you are at creating an effective email campaign. HTML emails have the special ability to be able to track your readers behavior. There are basically two tracking measures: 1) who opens or looks at you email and 2) click tracking or link tracking. Both of these can be extremely helpful in understanding what your readers want or focus on.

Open or Read Tracking
Whenever someone looks at your email in their inbox, this can be tracked. A typical open rate is between 40% and 70%, we have seen this go well over 150%, which indicates that your email was forwarded often. The better your list is the better this rate will be. Over time you can see trends in how people open your email.

Click Tracking
You can know each time someone clicks on a link in your email. This can be critical information, showing you what articles or sections are of more interest. A carefully crafted HTML email will have a short paragraph with a link to read more. This pairing will let users decide what is of interest. This also allows you to get more into your email. This is powerful for you and efficient for your readers.

Conversion Rate
This is the rate at which your readers turn into customers or existing customers purchase something. Standard conversion rates are between 1% and 2%. How well your email is crafted makes all the difference.

Inspire Loyalty with Your Message

Keeping your customers loyal can be as simple a keeping people on your subscriber list. The real aim for your email campaigns is to create an atmosphere where people want to participate and learn more. Surveys can really help do this. People like taking surveys! Not long ones, but short polls.

Think of it this way: your e-mails are the voice of your company, and as such, the loyalty users show in maintaining their subscription to your newsletter may ultimately reflect their loyalty to your company. If you have a high unsubscribe rate, your recipients are telling you they are not interested in being loyal to you or perhaps in being your customer. You have not provided sufficient motivation and value for them to want to continue hearing from you. It is not a long jump from unsubscribing to your newsletter to forgetting about your company, or doing business with a competitor.

The cost of acquiring new customers far exceeds the cost of retaining them.
Intent - with a proper measurement, you can ask customers to indicate their intent to take a specific action. For example, you can measure how many recipients clicked on a link to indicate that they plan on attending an event you are sponsoring.
Coupon click-rate - measures how many recipients clicked on electronic coupons embedded in an e-mail that are available for printing.
Forwarding - measures how many recipients forwarded your e-mail message to another e-mail address.

One of the highest indications of loyalty, before buying your products or services, is telling others about you or forwarding your email. Studies do show that people do consider e-mail communication among friends as an important element in maintaining relationships. This would seem to indicate that forwarding useful information and content to others is likely to rise in the future.

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