Best Practices on Constructing an Email Newsletter and Improving its Performance

Many companies would like to send their subscribers a periodic email newsletter. The primary objective is to get their subscribers to read what the company has to say and keep the subscribers either informed about or take action.  How to keep the subscribers get hooked to the newsletter and make them act?

Here are some great ideas to improve your email newsletters for better performance.  

Subject line: Use concise subject lines, emphasizing the recipient’s benefit and prompt him/her to take action. Personalization and Individualization with Title, First Name (or Last Name), City, Login Id or Email Id will also greatly benefit.

Editorial for your readers: According to a recent survey, subscribers are engaged more by newsletters with an editorial, than a newsletter without a proper introduction. Another positive effect of the editorial is that you can highlight particular elements of your newsletter to your audience

Directory for a better orientation: If your newsletter consists of several articles, then a link directory is essential. This way your recipients can reach the article they are most interested in reading with one simple click. But make sure you don’t over burden them with too many articles.

Add to address book: Benefit from the positive effects an attractive image can bring you by ensuring that all images and illustrations are directly shown to your subscribers by simply asking your readers to add your email address to their address books. ISPs provides greater deliverability of your newsletter by directly putting them in the inbox of the recipient bypassing spam filters and enable images in the newsletter automatically.

Opportunity to subscribe: If a person receives a forwarded newsletter he/she should immediately have the opportunity to subscribe, so make sure you offer the possibility to subscribe after the obligatory unsubscribe link.

Show the recipient’s email address: State the recipient’s email address to raise the credibility of your email and facilitate readers who receive your newsletter several times to subscribe with the right email address.

Link to profile data: Your recipients should have the chance to update their profile. That way you are you able avoid unnecessary unsubscriptions.

Link to View Online link: Provide a view online link for subscribers whose email servers blocked the images, so that they can visit the landing page directly through their browser.

Engage with your audience: get people encouraged to share travel reviews/ advices / tips / pictures. Offer free reward points for people who help friends and family sign up for our newsletter.

Enable Social Media links: get your subscribers to interact with your social media accounts and share it with their networks.

Enable Forward to a Friend link: get your subscribers to share the email newsletter with their friends and also to invite them to join the newsletter subscription.

Take advantage of every single touch point: Think about every way you can increase subscribers, taking advantage of every contact you have with your customers and prospects. Have a subscription box on every page of your website; at events or in-store promotions ask if the interested person would like to receive the newsletter and preferably obtain permission there and then; add a footer to all staff emails; promote the benefits of signing up by enhancing the subscription value with customer testimonials and offering incentives for sign.

Email Marketing Best Practices: Use of Colours in HTML Emails

In everything from images to fonts, colors play an important role in the email design process but can also create problems. For example, don’t choose a font color such as a muted gray on a gray background that makes your headlines and calls-to-action difficult to read. And don’t run the risk of hiding valuable information in your emails by blending the content into the background. Men and women react differently to colors, but several polls on color preferences by gender and age yield interesting results:  

Target Audience	Favorite Colors	Least Favorite Colors
Females	Blue, Purple, Green (all "cool" colors)	Orange, Brown, Gray ("warm" and "neutral" colors)
Males	Blue, Green, Black (two "cool" and one "neutral" color)	Brown, Orange, Purple ("neutral", "warm" and "mixed" colors)
All Genders	Preferences for Green decrease with age; Preferences for purple increase with age	Dislike of Orange increases with age

 
For more information on color preferences and perceptions, check out these resources:

http://desktoppub.about.com/cs/color/a/symbolism.htm

http://desktoppub.about.com/od/howcolorworks/l/aa_colorsee.htm  

For Background Color, Use a white or very light-colored background with a dark to medium font color to make it easy for recipients to read your email message. Also, if you use background colors in sidebar boxes contain them within tables and avoid using a body background color, because Web-based clients remove the body tag and typically place its attributes within a table. Email clients such as Microsoft Outlook might retain the specified background color when replying to or forwarding the email, but other clients use their colors, making message text difficult to read in some instances.