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Webbed Feet UK, web developers in Salisbury, Wiltshire

Tips for a successful email newsletter

Email newsletters are a great marketing tool for staying connected with the users and customers of your web site. Keeping existing visitors connected and engaged with your website, business or online shop will help retain custom and increase the users’ emotional attachment with your brand. Whereas web sites tend to be used as a tool, newsletters have a greater personal connection with users as they arrive in their personal inbox. This increased emotional attachment is a double edged sword, however; a successful newsletter can further bind attachments and increase brand awareness, yet a poor newsletter can have a strong negative impact on your users’ perception of you and your web site. Creating a successful e-newsletter is therefore paramount.

A simple layout

A user engages with a newsletter differently than a web site. A web site is often used as a tool; a user wishes to complete a task and then leave the web site in the shortest amount of time possible. For this reason, web sites are often glanced at and scanned, with the user drawn towards the content where they hope to locate the piece of information they came looking for. If they cannot locate this information they will leave and look elsewhere. A newsletter on the other hand has a much greater connection with the user, and many users forward the newsletter onto friends and family.

A simple layout is one which has minimal non-essential elements, with a great amount of emphasis on the content. This point ties in with the two points which are made shortly; be aware of different email clients, and keep the content brief and precise. In our findings we have found plain text newsletters (nothing more than plain text, divided into sections using CAPITALISED headings) often outperform HTML newsletters (coloured, styled, includes images) when comparing the click through rates back onto the web site from the newsletter.

Subscribing and unsubscribing should be easy

Subscribing and unsubscribing rates are usually high for many web sites, but slight improvements can still make a large difference. For web sites with a high number of subscribers, say tens of thousands, improving the subscription rate could equate to thousands of new and engaged subscribers. It is also important to allow a person to unsubscribe from the newsletter in an efficient manner. If people feel it will be time consuming to unsubscribe to a newsletter they may mark it as SPAM in their email client, therefore blacklisting your email address. This may have an impact on any future email based communication you wish to have with the user.

Make subscribing and unsubscribing a one or two click process. Clearly, but briefly, state how to subscribe or unsubscribe on the web site.

Be aware of different email clients

One of the reasons for the success of our plain text newsletter approach was the increased usability across many email platforms, as well as the reduction of being marked as SPAM. As many of us will know, complicated newsletters with lots of images can often be displayed terribly in some of our email clients, with images blocked (and replaced with that annoying red cross) and sometimes the entire layout wrongly displayed. Different email clients will often display HTML based emails differently, so this poses a problem for web site owners.

Whereas people use a handful of browsers to display a web site, web designers are able to successfully overcome cross browser compatibility issues. A web designer will test the web site on FireFox, Internet Explorer, Opera etc. The problem with email clients is their vast number, and difference in compatibility they pose. This is why plain text emails, or HTML emails with simple designs which are more likely to display successfully, should be sought after.

Keep content brief and to the point

Only around 20% of newsletter receivers fully read a newsletter. Email newsletters are often skimmed, with the user reading headings and brief parts of the text to quickly note any news or relevant information they care about. The content of the newsletter must therefore be brief and allow users to casually scan over the newsletter and gain information quickly. For those who like to read items in greater detail there should be a “view more” link to the main article on the web site, or the information should not be too long or intrusive.

Do you need an email newsletter creating for your website?

Please do not hesitate to contact us if you wish to discuss e-newsletters for your own web site. WebbedFeetUK Ltd is a group of professional web site designers in Salisbury, and since we were established in 2001 we have created many web sites for our satisfied clients across the UK.

This article is categorised within:

Online Marketing