Newsletters are a Marketing Tool

A newsletter sent via email should be your first marketing campaign in the Web2.0 universe. They are relatively easy to set up meaning they don't require a lot more resources than you've already got available on your personal computer and as a campaign they are incredibly powerful. Start by compiling a list of email addresses for each and every person that has ever bought anything from you. Rifle the old invoices and make a sub-project of discovering a current email adress for everyone on that list. These folks already liked you enough to give you money and the huge majority will not object to hearing from you on a regular basis.

Manage your Mailing List

Start small because starting is the most important part. Don't get caught in the trap of "have to have before you can do", if you insist on building the cathedral before you invite people to your church, you'll never have a church. Just build a "Mailing List" in your Mail User Agent (MUA) and add the names you collected from your "invoice rifling subproject" as you find current email addresses for them. Also develop a procedure to capture email addresses (and mailing list permission) from any new customers you create and add them to the list. While developing that procedure make another one for taking folks off the list that opt-out. There will be a small percentage of 'Grumpy Gus's that will do so, when they do try to maintain a professional demeanor as this is a professional endeavor, not a personal one.

Mail to your list EVERY month

I know this is the hard part, but it's also important, so don't shirk it. I start a webpage on my local drive for next month and whenever I get a bright idea I open the page and add to it. Then a couple of days before my deadline I go into a flurry of activity and try to polish it up enough to "go to press" as it were. You could just make a text file or word processor document and stash it in a NEWSLETTER folder somewhere you can find it again and start a similar procedure to mine. The purpose of the newsletter is to let people know that you are still alive and well and that you would like to serve them in a similar manner in the future. This is Bulk Mail technology, so by sending a message you'll satisfy this purpose just by having it appear in their in-box, if they open it, so much the better, but it's not required. Advertisers call it impressions, and it is magical. Let me make this clear, because it is the newsletter project's Prime Directive: "remind your customers you are still here and desirous of servicing them again in the future."

Good start is also the irreducable minimum

The above procedure gets you to "a good start" and will give you noticable improvement in marketing your business, but it is only a beginning. The product you're sending is a text message that may not have lasting value to the recipient. Similar to a postcard mailing through the Postal Service it will remind your customers that they bought something from you and also that they could and should buy from you again. Also this level of technology should not be employed to a list that is larger than 50 or 60 recipients. Once your list gets closer to 100, you will have to employ a professional mailing service. Sorry, it's not an option, this necessity is wrapped up in the SPAM problem and rather than learn all the ins and outs of identifying yourself as a not-SPAMmer, just find and use a reputable Mailing Service. My favorite is MailChimp, but there are many others that do a good job and will let you grow in a safe manner.

HTML Email

Moving up from there, you'll want to create a more aesthetic piece that includes images, graphics, color, links to articles you're quoting, etc. You can't do that with your MUA for a bunch of reasons, most of them due to SPAM related rules that have cropped up over the years in the email channel. So composing a pretty HTML message in Thunderbird or Outlook isn't going to look the same to the person receiving it which is the desired result. The correct solution is to make a web page hosted on your own website and then pointing to it in your email message. Another advantage to this technique is permanance, you're saving all that creation energy because your composition is still available long after your recipients delete it from their inbox. There are several other advantages in the SEO realm of Link Juice, Page Rank, FaceBook Likes, etc that are covered in other documents. For this reference, suffice it to say that you really do want to make this move and the time and trouble will ultimately be worth it.

From here, this reference will get increasingly more technical and for that, all we can do is apologize. Because coding is a technical subject with its own language, patterns and mores. If you want to dive into it yourself (which we heavily encourage) you'll have to click on the reference links to research and clear up concepts you don't understand. Honest, you CAN slog your way through this and come out with self-sufficiency, but if the frustration factor gets too high, drop us a note and we'll connect you with a professional.

Code mobility

Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) has been the "way to go" for website design for a bunch of years, but it breaks horribly when you try to use it in the email channel. When composing your newsletter on your website for publication, stick with pure W3C approved HTML tags and pretend like <div> and <span> are blasphemy. This also means forget about ActiveX, Flash, Java and JavaScript, to be successful you'll just have to rely on 1995 vintage technology.

Also remember that your code is going out into the world by itself, so ensure you dress it properly before shipping it. Relative paths to elements won't work, the image file has to be coded to:
http://www.pmaco.com/newsletter/images/buttons/right-arrow_blue.jpg
Not
../images/buttons/right-arrow_blue.jpg

No CSS means you don't get a background color or image in the <body> either, so start with a single "Body table" that defines your width as 600px (the best compromise for all the possible MUAs out there) and define your background color or image in the table tag.

Newsletter Anatomy

Body Table defines width at 600px and encompasses your entire piece.

Thumbnail near the top of the page. When sharing your newsletter on Facebook, LinkedIn, Reddit, etc. their site is going to (usually) give you a choice of thumbnails for your post that they grab from your page. Put a good image (100px square) in your code early that will appropriately catch a scanner's attention because some sites will only let you use the first one they see, or nothing.

Subject Line should communicate the purpose of your newsletter and be recyclable.

TO: field should contain your recipient's name rather than just their email @dress

FROM: field should be your company name or something that is recyclable across all your campaigns and communicates that it's from you. Consistency is key here so your recipients won't flag you as SPAM.

Reply To: DO NOT put in a "no-reply" @dress here. You WANT people to reply to your newsletter and the easiest way for them is to click the "reply" button, so when they do it should work. If/when you actually get a reply, it is imperative that you respond to it. That's part of the Prime Directive.

Header: (the top of the page) has your company logo, PHYSICAL address (not a PO Box) and any other contact information you'd like, phone, email, website, fax, etc. as well as a link to the page on your website "Use this link to view our newsletter in your browser".

Footer: (the bottom of the page) MUST have an "opt-out" link and should have your copyright notice. It should also have a Facebook Like/Share button.

View Output

For any marketing piece you want to try to "look at it through the customer's eyes" which requires a viewpoint shift. Marketing professionals can do this shift in their head without any conscious effort, but it is kind of alien for normal mortals. With email marketing you also need to view your product through a few of the MANY channels your recipients are going to be using. Yahoo, Gmail, AOLmail, and Hotmail are all very popular free email accounts that are probably in use by many on your list and are easy to set up for experimentation. Make yourself an account on each of them and add them to your mailing list so you can send a pre-test of your newsletter and make any last minute changes you notice when viewed through these different Webmail interfaces.

Ideally you'll recruit a few of your friends to be your editors and let them make suggestions prior to publication.

Plain Text Version

This is kind of an extension of the "view output" concept. Some of your recipients have set their MUA to read plain text only and therefore will see your newsletter as code-level gobble-de-gook. Mail Chimp sends two versions for you, HTML and Plain text, but you have to edit the plain text version for it to look right. Please don't skrimp on this step. Read and edit your plain text version extensively (while observing the "view output" concept above) so it will communicate to the folks that can only get it in this form.

Follow up

Once you've mailed your newsletter, you're only about 90% done with the project. Members of your mailing list have gotten it and hopefully like it enough to forward it on to some of their friends. But, you've also got it published on your website as part of your content and that can be promoted as well. Make a checklist of Social Media sites that you frequent and post the link to your newsletter to each site on that checklist after publication.