The Email Newsletter

I’m responsible for looking after our monthly Pure360 email newsletter. It takes coordination, time and creativity to put together each edition, if you write one, you’ll know, but I’m lucky to have the help of a range of email marketing experts to help me along the way.  

Here are my top 5 things to think about when sending your email newsletter:

1. Your Objective

You need to know this before you do anything… what are you aiming to achieve from sending the company email newsletter?

• Communicate with your customers and/or market

• Sales generation

• Brand building

• Promoting special offers

• Generate feedback

If you don’t know why you’re sending it, your subscribers won’t see any reason to read it…and won’t.

2. Know your Audience

You need to get into the mind of your audience.

What do they want to read about? Or what would be valuable for them to know about your company (not just what you want to tell them)?

We send two versions of our company email newsletter, one to our customers and one to our subscribers and prospective clients. Each is tailored with different articles and advice as they both have different information requirements. Like most people, I’m personally likely to hit the delete button if I skim read irrelevant information so make sure yours doesn’t end up in the bin.

3. The Content

Do you have content?

It’s a nightmare if you’re given the task of creating the newsletter, but you feel you don’t have anything to say. If you don’t have anything new or exciting to tell your readers – why not add some industry news?

Key: Remember your objective and tailor content appropriately.

Do you include?

• Blogs

• Company reports

• Customer case studies

• Expert advice

• Events

• Industry news

If not then why not give them a try?

4. The Creation Checklist

Hmmm…..my favorite stage!

You really do need at least two sets of fresh eyes to look over your newsletter. Search out people that you can get to give your email newsletter a proof read. Is it technically great?

It’s vital to get our email communications perfect - email marketing is our business! We are only human and mistakes can happen…that’s why having a checklist can prove invaluable….

I follow this basic checklist:

1.    Spelling and grammar correct?

2.    Are the links working?

3.    Plain text version correct?

4.    Are all images click throughs?

5.    Does every image have an alt tag?

6.    Personalisation (may not be relevant sometimes)

7.    Unsubscribe?

8.    Check again, you can never test too much

I usually check twice…not the most fun task of the day…but more fun than sending an email newsletter to your whole mailing list with a mistake.

5. The Send

You’ve got that newsletter perfect, now it’s time to send. Optimum times to send your newsletters can vary from company to company; check out our guide to email marketing timing to see the best time for your company.

If you don’t reach people at an optimum time for them first time round, I always retarget. This month, I’ll be using the new Resend to non-opens feature, which makes my life easier, allowing me to automatically schedule the resend to non-opens when I schedule the initial delivery.

So that’s my Pure360 top 5 things to think about, there are many more, but I think 5 is more than enough for one day…. want to see our email newsletter? You can sign up here.