10 ways to create the perfect newsletter for your website
August 4th, 2008 Posted in MagazinesWhat’s the news?
I’ve mentioned elsewhere in this blog that virtually every website marketing book I ever read encourages the use of newsletters as an essential marketing tool.
My favourite website design magazine ‘net’ is just out - and yes, I’ve finally taken out a subscription as it was costing so much to buy the copies individually.
It’s got a really useful feature this month entitled ‘Create the perfect newsletter’.
As ever, the best bet is to get hold of a copy yourself (I’m not on commission, honestly!) but I’ll summarise some of the key learning points here.
10 key points
- Plan first (ie who do you want to reach?) be creative later. Don’t rush into the creative bit before you’ve decided what you want to achieve from your newsletter.
- Keep content short, sharp and relevant … put yourself in the audience’s shoes and write for them.
- Draw users into your newsletter with questions or teasers like ‘Find out how to win this great prize’ or similar.
- Your newsletter needs a subject line that makes you want to look and it needs to come from a trusted address. So a sender address like 123xyz@hotmail.com isn’t very attractive, whereas a sender address like paul@webcumbria.co.uk is. ‘Does it look like spam?’ is the key question to ask yourself.
- Competitions and topical content work well.
- Use tables in the HTML design of your newsletters as they achieve the best results in most email clients … and take care with colours as they’ll be translated differently depending on email client.
- Use inline styling, not CSS or JavaScript, as newsletters need self-contained code.
- Promote your newsletter well within the 400 pixel pane which Outlook Express allows via its preview options. this is your golden opportunity to encourage recipients to make the next click.
- Offer an alternative version of the newsletter via a web link within the newsletter … this will make doubly sure a recipient can read what you’re sending.
- Make sure you offer an ‘unsubscribe’ option in your newsletters.
5 best newsletters
The article goes on to list 5 of what it considers the best examples of newsletters .. but I guess you’ll have to sign up to the newsletters on each site to see if you agree!
Read the full article ‘Create the perfect newsletter’ in net magazine issue 179
