brendonhatcher
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[READ FIRST] The complexities of email newsletters today - 2006/11/21 04:44
When I first started sending email newsletters for my clients 3 years ago, I began with the presumption that email newsletter sending was easy. It wasn’t, and unfortunately, 3 years later it is even more complex, not less.
So, I thought I’d kick off this forum by posting a list of the issues that confront us today, in the hope that this will generate several threads and take us all closer to email newsletter ease and simplicity.
The role I play in my company is web strategist – helping clients to understand technology and implement it in their business. As such, I can speak about a very wide range of issues but am not necessarily an expert in all (or any of them) - if I an incorrect in any of my statements, please correct me in a spirit of constructive engagement.
On to my sad list:
1. Email browsers have widely differing abilities to display HTML and CSS, making effective email formatting very difficult.
---> Best practice for email newsletter coding
2. Apart from the software that you use to send the email (e.g. Acajoom), there are several other players involved in the successful delivery of your newsletter – and these players do not have the same goals as you. For example, your host provider may have all sorts of server configurations in place that prevent successful bulk mail sending, driven by their need to conserve bandwidth.
---> Working with your host provider
3. Newsletter recipients are inundated with spam, meaning that you have to tread carefully in order to avoid annoying them.
4. Since spammers ignore unsubscribes, your efforts to convince recipients that you are running a legitimate list and will remove them often falls on deaf ears.
---> Getting and keeping happy recipients
5. Irate recipients have effective methods of blocking legitimate newsletters but not actual spam. For example, they can blacklist you because your valid email address is associated with the email. Spammers get away with spamming because they do not provide legitimate sender email addresses.
---> The threats to your sending resulting from anti-spam services
6. Clients frequently have an existing mailing list – usually messy, out of date, and gathered from vague sources, possibly without permission to send newsletters to those addresses. I find that many clients don’t want to use an opt-in process because they know that most recipients will drop off the list
---> Educating clients
---> Best practice for establishing and maintaining opt-in permission-based recipient lists
7. People receive so many email newsletters and email messages that getting and keeping their attention is difficult.
---> Style and content guidelines for getting and keeping attention
8. They read it, so what? It is essential to integrate email newsletters into your overall marketing process or web promotion process.
---> Making your newsletter work for your business/site
If anyone else has any other items to add to my list, post them below. Otherwise, add your comments to each of the threads.
Regards
Brendon
Post edited by: brendonhatcher, at: 2006/11/20 21:54
Post edited by: brendonhatcher, at: 2006/11/20 22:07
Post edited by: brendonhatcher, at: 2006/11/20 22:13
Post edited by: brendonhatcher, at: 2006/11/20 22:22
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