Advertising with e-mail newsletter

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E-mail newsletter is a very effective email marketing technique used by advertisers to market products and services using email as an information carrier. Many people like you believe that e-mail newsletter must be created and sent by professionals who dedicate their time and skills in email marketing only and therefore might do it better than you. Other people think that sending e-mail newsletter is dangerous because of the tricky anti-spam laws existing in the United States and they prefer to stay away. If you do so, you miss the opportunity. You can earn at least 50% more money than you do now if you make e-mail newsletter your friend.

Sending e-mail newsletter is actually safe if you do it correctly. You only need to understand the basics and avoid a few major mistakes some people make on the way to success. You can master it, and you can do it yourself using simple rules of thumb and an inexpensive email newsletter software. You do not have to pay a big buck for a simple job that professionals would do for you. They like your money, and they will do everything to make you believe in complexity of the matter.

Let us start from the basics. To understand what you should do and what you must avoid, put yourself into customer's shoes. Imagine yourself sitting home after a tough day totally exhausted. The only thing you want to do is to rest. Probably, you want to read a book or dedicate yourself to your hobby. When you just begin to have fun, your phone starts to ring every 10 minutes, and a brisk voice tries to sell you something you do not really need. You go to your computer to view your photos or chat with friends and you notice your mailbox is full of colorful junk. Be sure that all junk messages will be deleted even without reading. The telemarketers will be advised to go some place far away no-one returns from. Do not do this mistake. Treat your customers the same way you would treat yourself. This is the most important rule of thumb.

Do not send email newsletter excessively often and know your customer interests. If you sell books, pay attention to the types of books your customer buys. Send information only about related books in your e-mail newsletter. A person who reads detectives might not be interested in love stories. Know that an average person within a month normally reads one or two books. It means that a single customer must not receive more than 2 e-mail newsletters a month.

Always use a short and informative content for your e-mail newsletter. If you send html newsletters with graphics and font colors or styles, use it in moderation. Human brain is trained to delete all e-mail newsletters that are either too long or too colorful without reading. Your e-mail newsletter must contain only the key information and be strait-to-the-point starting from the first word (no introductions and conclusions whatsoever). If you use images in your e-mail newsletter, limit yourself to only a few images displaying the product key features only.

Before the first e-mail newsletter is sent, you must ask your customer for a permission to subscribe him or her to your e-mail newsletter list, and provide an easy way to unsubscribe. Normally, you ask for the permission when the initial purchase in made and place an unsubscribe link at the end of your e-mail newsletter. This way you will comply with the anti-spam laws. It is absolutely legal to send e-mail newsletters to the people who intentionally subscribe to your list. However you must immediately stop sending your e-mail newsletters to those users who unsubscribed from your list or whose email addresses turned to be invalid.

Now let us talk about an email newsletter software. Normally, you use a content management software (CMS) with a database on your website and a shopping cart linked to your e-commerce provider. You can get a targeted e-mail list either from your website database or from your e-commerce provider. Getting e-mail list from your website database is preferable because you can narrow your quires and get e-mail lists of customers associated with purchased products. You should get your data in form of plain text files either tab-delimited or CSV that can be imported in any email newsletter software.

Create a new project in your email newsletter software and import recipients that should receive your e-mail newsletter. You want to import your recipients along with all personal information including the products they ordered and dates of purchase because you will use it to personalize your e-mail newsletters.

Create an email newsletter template and reference customer information in it. Use a personal salutation at the beginning of the template that looks like "Hello, {FIRSTNAME}!". It will allow you to greet every customer with his or her real name. Mention the products he or she ordered after salutation including the dates of purchase like this: "Thank you for purchasing {PRODUCT} on {DATE}". Then go strait to the point and describe the related product in a few short sentences. Then offer a discount coupon so that the new product could be ordered at a bit lower price. Finally, do not forget to put an unsubscribe instructions at the end of the new e-mail newsletter.

Now you are ready to send your e-mail newsletter. You must use the lowest possible sending speed that lets you deliver your e-mail newsletter within an acceptable time interval but not faster than it is necessary. The slower you send the better delivery rate you get. Super fast delivery may cause your IP address to be blocked by email servers for 24 hours which will cause your e-mail newsletter to be rejected.

Use an SMTP email account given to you by your email provider. Be aware that it can be limited in the number of messages you are allowed to send per hour and day. If you need to send more e-mail newsletters than your email account allows you, use several email accounts. You can mix your current SMTP account with free accounts you can get at GMail, Yahoo, MSN, Go Daddy. Every email account will increase the total number of e-mail newsletters you are allowed to send per hour and day.

You can also use any paid SMTP email account where you pay for the number of e-mail newsletters you send. They usually sell packages with monthly limits. For example, you can order a package for $30 a month that will allow you to send 5000 e-mail newsletters a month or a package for $50 allowing you to send 10000 e-mail newsletters a month. The more you pay monthly the greater the number of allowed e-mail newsletters will be.