Email newsletter dos and don'ts

Newsletters can be an incredibly effective tool for demonstrating expertise, providing updates and building loyalty. Unsurprisingly, given the ease which they can track response data, email newsletter usage is on the up. Andy Sivell provides some top tips for getting the most from your email communication.

Have a valid reason to email

...And make sure that it’s driven by your readers’/clients’ needs, not your own. ‘Staying in touch’ is not a valid reason; making your client base aware of technical information that may affect how they specify your products is. Equally, don’t worry about publishing to a set timetable. Your clients are unlikely to be waiting anxiously for your next issue and therefore won’t notice if you publish at irregular intervals. It’s far more important that when you do publish, they take note because they know it will be worth reading.

Set objectives and measure performance

While the concept of measuring performance is second nature to all marketing professionals what and how you measure deserves careful consideration when it comes to eNewsletters. It’s easy to become distracted by open rates, but click-through rates are more significant, and email response and forward rates potentially more important still. In industries such as construction, where the sales process can involve separate influencers, specifiers and purchasers, it may be impractical to link a single newsletter’s objectives directly to sales. But where one is using different eNewsletters to communicate with disparate groups it may be the only practical measure of success!

Keep it simple

Where email newsletters are concerned the decision whether or not to open is usually taken in a matter of seconds. Once opened, the decision whether or not to read on is often taken after the briefest of scans. (That email newsletters still work despite this is surely evidence of their power). It therefore pays to keep your messages simple. Make it easy to identify relevant stories using descriptive headings, and to navigate using obvious links.

Get the subject line right

Type ‘subject line length’ into Google and it will return over 11m pages. Having read a fair number of those myself I can report that many of them offer completely conflicting advice. Subject lines are vital because only they, and the sender’s name, will determine whether or not an email gets opened. The most honest advice is that only testing will determine what works best for you. For what it’s worth, I always start with short (50 characters and spaces) subject lines and take it from there. I have also found that subject lines with ‘clever’ word play get ignored, and that the more boringly descriptive they are, the better.

Do not use misleading subject lines: they are the recipe to instant ‘unsubscribes’.

Remember: ‘data’ is as important as ‘design’

Your email newsletter will only ever be as good as the data used to send it. Newsletters sent to the wrong person, that ‘bounce’ back, or that are (heaven forbid) unsolicited or irrelevant only heighten people’s wariness of spam. A simple, but highly effective, way round this is to use an existing and successful eNewsletter to promote your message. Trade eNewsletters such as ribaproductselector.com’s email product alert select are published to a known timetable, from a known source, and are only mailed to recipients who have actively opted-in to receive them. They are therefore anticipated, opened and always relevant.

Make it personal

Email personalisation is so easy that there really is no excuse for not including it in all email communications, not least because it also succinctly demonstrates to the recipient that you crafted your message for them.

Use high quality images and illustrations

As anyone knows who has seen a ‘heat map’ of where readers click within emails to get more information, pictures make a huge the difference. Good pictures can make the difference between decent response rates and outstanding ones. Interestingly, I come across very few really good case study images covering construction industry products, and yet close-ups and technical detail are often what specifiers want to see. Invest in good quality photography and use it liberally.

Employ the right designer

Email design is a niche of web design that is surprisingly misunderstood – by website designers. Email design uses HMTL 3.0 and tables, and while that will no doubt change soon, until it does it pays to get a designer that is experienced at designing and coding specifically for email. Email marketing application service providers (ASPs) frequently provide useful templates but an ‘access for all’ business model inevitably results in their servers being associated with spam, which means that your eNewsletter will get blocked before it can even reach the recipient’s desktop. Faced with that scenario paid-for inclusion in an established eNewsletter such as select can often work out as the more cost-efficient option.

Get more information about select, the email newsletter sent to over 8,000 construction industry specifiers

 

Author Andy Sivell is a copywriter and founder of content provider Working Titles.

 

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