E-mail Newsletters - Easy? Hard? Advice?

DoubleCheese · 21 Sep 2009 at 12:06

Afternoon all,
How easy is it to knock up a template that can be used to regularly mail our customers with newsletters? The newsletter isn't long or graphic heavy, just a couple of logo's and text and some hyperlinks to our website.

Can this be achieved with a readily available app. Outlook? or is it something more intricate that needs outsourcing?

Thanks.

~J~ · 21 Sep 2009 at 12:17

Couple of things to remember:

If you send out a lot of emails as a newsletter, whilst you yourself and your customers may take them as genuinly informative, the ISPs may see them as SPAM and as such your domain may get blacklisted (getting OFF this list can be a nightmare).

Likewise, depending on what SPAM protection your recipients use (SPAM Assasin, even Outlook SPAM) HTML emails may not get through or appear as text only.

Can't really answer the main question as we use an IronPort for our emails, but just hopefully a little bit of friendly advice before you pursue your task

daz · 21 Sep 2009 at 12:22

I would recommend using a service like Aweber to collect the emails and handle the delivery.

DoubleCheese · 21 Sep 2009 at 13:22

Thanks for the advice. The email's will be sent to people who register/apply on our site. So its not wholesale email newsletters as such. They currently get an email but its very basic and I want to spruce it up.

simisker · 21 Sep 2009 at 15:18

Take a look at:

http://www.mailchimp.com/

http://www.campaignmonitor.com/

Both are responsible email delivery & tracking providers [well, as limited as tracking is with emails], both have templating facilities to produce deliverable emails [the coding behind an email can have an alarming impact on deliverability, and effective email coding is like stepping back in time ten years], and I think both have free-for-low-numbers offers, if I remember rightly. I know Mailchimp does, anyway.

Might be useful

Tripnologist · 21 Sep 2009 at 16:40

Simisker gives good advice I think.
Doing a 'nice' newsletter which will end up being readable for near everyone on your mailing list is actually more tricky than you would think. Everyone uses different apps and different mail services all with varying degrees of competence when it comes to html/css.

Alternatively, do some reading and do it yourself, or outsource it.

-TA- · 21 Sep 2009 at 22:33

campaign monitor is good! we use it at work, the stats are mighty useful.