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Email Marketing Guide 1: Getting started

5. Get started with email newsletters and ezines

Email marketing has been rightly hailed as an excellent marketing and customer retention tool and both email newsletters and ezines are the most widely used applications within email marketing. However, just as in any other aspect of business you should have clear goals in mind before embarking on this form of marketing.

Here is a brief overview of the steps you should follow in creating email newsletters and ezines:

• Start with a plan - Establish why you are creating email newsletters or ezines: Is it for customer retention, selling, upselling and/or brand reinforcement? Set up a realistic publishing schedule. Designate a Project Manager who will oversee all aspects of creating the email newsletter and ensure it stays on track and remains consistent - the only way you're going to see business results. Where will your data come from? Where will it come from as you continue publishing?
• Decide on the content - Before creating email newsletters consider if you have the in-house resources or need to outsource content. Look at your content 'WIFM factor' (What's In It For Me?). Readers need to feel they've received something of value (such as special deals or relevant content), not just advertising or marketing messages. Prepare text in a 'web style'. Remember that people SCAN. Try to keep articles to fewer than 500 words - 800 at most. If the content, product and/or service merits longer content, break it up into several web pages. Create spacing around text for ease of reading, between 50-125 words per paragraph, and use bullet points and for breaking up text.
• Design your email newsletter template - The layout should be simple and easy to navigate. Create a masthead that brands your email newsletters or ezines, which you can use for every issue. When creating newsletters the design should take into consideration the use of a preview pane or the possibility that the graphics are not viewable. Any graphics used should have a professional quality to them and fit into your company's overall image.
• Track & measure results - It isn't enough to just mail your list. You need to build up information about your list - so you can send them increasingly relevant mailings that will keep them opening and clicking. Capture and use the statistics available to you. Hopefully you will have access to your measured open rates, click-throughs, forwarded and most popular articles. This information can help you in refining content for future issues of your email newsletters or ezines. Getting your readers to interact with you is the key to keeping them active and opening. Other ways to gather information about your readers is to solicit feedback within the email newsletter or run a survey - encouraging responses by offering a prize draw. Surveys are a very valuable way to find out information about your subscribers and how you can improve your email newsletter.

Related article: Set goals before you send ezines

Related article: Tips for improving your newsletter

Areas covered in this guide

• Introduction
• People's relationship with email
• Email marketing applications
• Getting your HTML emails right
• > Get started with an email newsletter