Email Marketing, E-Newsletters, Email Newsletters

E-newsletters: paths and obstacles to success

Email marketing is not just about unsolicited emails with advertisements making outrageous claims. E-newsletters are one form of email marketing that generates genuine interest in readers, without pushing the sales line.

But in the rush to the virtual printing presses, marketers and business owners often make costly mistakes, or lose sight of the true purpose of their communications with their customer base.

The first important step towards a successful e-newsletter is to make the distinction between an email newsletter and email promotions. Promotions are action or transaction-oriented, designed to incite an immediate response from readers through a click, an enquiry, or a purchase.

For example, an email promotion may make a claim and a call to action related to a particular product, such as "By purchasing this vitamin supplement, you are guaranteeing you and your family a lifelong healthy future", the email newsletter features an article about the common effects of certain vitamin deficiencies.

Email newsletters may contain traces of action-related invitations, but their real purpose should be to build a gradual, lasting, long-term relationship with the reader. This means they may not induce immediate action at all. In fact, you may find that in the beginning, despite immense pride in your creative endeavours, you don’t hear a peep out of any of your subscribers.

If this is the case, do not despair, for your efforts are slowly creating a climate, an environment, and a relationship which subconsciously prepares the reader to take action a later date.

A common mistake when sending e-newsletters to subscribers is to write from a one-to-many, rather than a one-to-one communication perspective. In reality, you may well be writing the same e-newsletter to all your subscribers, but it is far better to give the impression that you are writing to each one of them individually.

To create this impression, start by sending your email from a designated staff member’s email address, not from a generic company address. Ensure also that what is displayed in the ‘To’ field is the individual subscriber’s email address, and not something impersonal like ‘List member’. There are many other creative ways to personalise your communications, with the help of email marketing software and access to behavioural data about your subscribers.

Another vital element in e-newsletter distribution is making your unsubscribe process quick and painless. It is not the case that a disgruntled subscriber is better than no subscriber at all. People should not have to jump through hoops to get off an address list, or wait a few more newsletter issues or emails checking whether they really do want to unsubscribe before their request is honoured.

Finally, make sure you maximise every opportunity to invite website visitors and face-to-face customers to join your emailing list. Instead of tagging a subscription box at the bottom of a web page, display it prominently as a feature item promoting the newsletter's contents and informing visitors of its frequency and associated privacy policy.

Give people the opportunity to sign-up for a newsletter everywhere: web pages, confirmation messages, thank you pages, receipts. Let people know what to expect if they subscribe: what kind of emails will land in their in-boxes and how often?