Tip One – Publishing a Winning Email Newsletter: Email Services
Learning the ins and outs of doing an email newsletter takes time. When I first started publishing email newsletters, I made many mistakes. I want to save you some time and headaches that these mistakes can cause. Over the next five weeks, I will be providing tips on publishing a winning email newsletter.
Use an Email Service
Do not send bulk emails from your personal email account. Outlook, gmail, yahoo, hotmail etc. are not designed to send bulk emails. If you send emails from your email account, you run the risk of being labeled as a spammer and your email can be blocked by your ISP provider. Bulk emails should be sent from recognized email broadcasters such as mailchimp, madmimi, constantcontact, aweber, 1shoppingcart etc. Most email services are reasonably priced and worth paying for. Mailchimp is free up to 2000 subscribers.
Using an email services also give you the ability to create a signup for your newsletter on your site and depending on the service you choose, do autoresponders. An Autoresponder is an email that goes out automatically to the subscriber after they sign up for your newsletter or purchase a product or service. The autoresponders are set up once and then the email service will do the rest. Some email services give you the ability to do an autoresponder series where you can schedule a series of autoresponders to go out over the course of period of time, i.e.., 2 days, 6 days etc. Autoresponders are a great way to stay in touch with your subscribers and upsell products and services. All email services provide at least one autoresponder, the one that goes out after the subscriber signs up. If you require additional autoresponders, an upgrade from the basic package may be required.
Most email services also have an opt in process in place which is a good email marketing practice. When the subscriber signs up for your newsletter they receive an email from the email service asking them to confirm their subscription. The opt in message insures that the subscriber is not being spammed and signed up to receive the newsletter. Email services also give the subscriber the ability to unsubscribe at any time which is a requirement of the CAN-SPAM Act.
A little research is all you need to do to find the email service that is right for you. Next week I will be writing about newsletter formatting.