99% of clients on SendaNewsletter.com would not claim to be web designers. They generally run small businesses and don’t want to be bogged down by learning how to design a newsletter.

To help these clients we set them up with a custom designed template that meets their needs and is consitent with the branding on their website. The clients can then use the editor in their SendaNewsletter account to update text, images, and links like they would in Word.

Occassionally clients though require a bit of extra help. Probably because they trying to do something a bit more complex with their existing template that requires a designers help. Read the rest of this entry »

Open rates - what are they?

Open rates are the number of emails opened as a percentage of email delivered.

Typically you’d expect open rates of between 20-40%. This is the recorded open rates. Just to make things more complex, it’s not posssible to record all opens, only some. For example, if the recipient is reading the newsletter in plain text, or they have the images blocked, the open can not be recorded. This may understate the amount of opens by as much as 100%. So if you had 100 opens the true number of opens may be as high as 200. Read the rest of this entry »

Flash and newsletters don’t mix.

How often have I seen people design a really sexy bit of Flash for a newsletter…not knowing no email system reads it. Flash is a terrible idea in a newsletter. Don’t do it! If you want to animate images you can use animated gifs. They don’t work on Outlook 2007. On Outlook 2007 the recipient will just see the first image in the animated gif, so all it not all lost.

Just remember that…

If you’re looking to include an attachment with a newsletter or email, please don’t. There’s a better way to send attachments.

Generally when you send an attachment for starters you’re sending the attachment with the newsletter. This makes the newsletter a large email to send. Imagine if your attachment was 1MB and you were sending to 10,000 recipients. You would be sending out 10GB worth of information in one go. This would almost certainly give your server, or ours, a heart attack. Read the rest of this entry »

Large images in newsletters are a bad idea!

Too often newsletter campaign managers download an image from a camera and upload it into their newsletter in SendaNewsletter.

If you take an image straight from a camera it’s likely to be over 1MB in size. This is huge in terms of the web. You need to resize and encode your images before uploading into a newsletter. Encoding will reduce the file size of your image, whilst trying to keep the image quality as good as possible. Read the rest of this entry »

What is the key to a good subject line?

Well to start off it’s good if it is catchy and grabs the recipients attention. Often asking a question in the newsletter can work well e.g. ‘Suffering from sleep depravation?’.

Another way to decide on the subject line is to think what is the main benefit to be gained from reading your newsletter e.g. ‘Invitation to event X’. Obviously make sure the subject line is not misleading. There’s nothing worse than feeling tricked when you open a newsletter. Read the rest of this entry »

A common mistake is to send out a list with duplicates, mis-spelt email addresses, a lot of dead out-of-date email addresses and unsubscribed email addresses.

If you’re email campaign has a lot of duplicated, misspellings and/or out-of-date email addresses it will effectively look a spam list, and this is likely to harm your chances of your newsletter reaching the recipients inbox, so you need to clean your list.

Read the rest of this entry »

Before sending out a newsletter, it is worth spam checking it.

There are loads of different spam filters out there and they all work slightly differently so it is difficult to make sure all your emails will avoid not be ‘junk folder’. Infact it is nigh on impossible as spam filters,  to a small degree, will not always correctly identify spam and in an over enthusiastic moment accidentally and incorrectly identify a genuine email as spam . So you can’t stop some small percentage of emails incorrectly being identified as spam. Read the rest of this entry »

When you are deciding on the ‘From’ name and email address that will appear in the recipients inbox what should you think about?

If you think the recipient is more likely to open the email if it is sent from a particular individual, maybe because that individual has met the recipients, it makes sense to use their name. If the recipient is more likely to know the company name then use the company. Read the rest of this entry »

Personalisation certainly helps.

If you receive a newsletter starting ‘Dear John’, this helps give the newsletter more credibility. It is not just random emai sent from a spammer but it comes across as a lot more professional and legimate. This is the most basic way to personalise a newsletter. Read the rest of this entry »