Sending HTML Email and Newsletters to Your Clients

Writing a newsletter can be a very beneficial part of your marketing campaign. It gives you the opportunity to promote products and services, gather feedback and intelligence, or just to stay in touch so that you remain within their radar. In this article, I will discuss issues that you need to be aware of so that you can decide whether your organization needs a newsletter campaign.

The first thing you need to be aware of is that for most of your clients, they are already receiving dozens of newsletters every day. How can you maintain constant contact with your clients without being a pest? Make sure that there is value in each one. Put yourself in their shoes and read over your newsletter. What is in it for you? Compare your newsletter to a similar campaign and identify what makes yours better.

Send your newsletters only to those people who will appreciate them. This means that these people must have had the opportunity to opt in to receive your newsletters. It is far more effective to have a targeted list of 100 interested recipients than to blast 100,000 emails to people who don’t want it. Not only is Email blasting a poor strategy, but in many states and provinces, it is illegal.

It wasn’t that long ago when sending and receiving HTML emails was such a cool thing to do. But only in a matter of months, this was abused by virus and adware authors. Today, Email clients disable HTML support by default. Many “fundamentalists” still prefer to only receive plain text email. So if you are only sending HTML emails, these recipients will only see the source code. So when creating your HTML newsletters, make sure that you have 2 versions: an HTML-formatted version, and a plain text version.

Spammers have abused the Internet from the day it was born. Almost every Email client nowadays has a built-in spam filter which can identify tell tale signs of a Email spam and automatically moves them into the Junk mail folder. Some Email clients allow users to automatically chuck spam into the trash. Before sending out your newsletters, review it for obvious signs of spam. There are numerous tools on the web to validate your newsletter before sending it out.

Mailing list marketing is a competitive market. There are hundreds of companies competing to get your business. They offer tools that will save time and money in managing your newsletter campaign. They offer hundreds of free templates that automatically generate HTML and plain text versions, list management tools and reports to measure your results, opt-in systems, viral capabilities to entice your clients to forward your newsletters to their friends, spam validation, and more. Most of them will have a “free version” or a limited time trial version. So try them out to find out if their services can help your organization manage your newsletter campaign.