1. Email Marketing
Email marketing is a great way to reach your customers
where they are without spending a lot of money. But it’s a
big responsibility, too—people don’t give their email
addresses to just anyone. Thinking about starting a
company newsletter? Here are some tips to keep in mind.
Make it easy to subscribe. Post a signup form on your
homepage, blog, Facebook page, and wherever else your
customers and fans are already active. You might want to
collect names and birthdays (for a special offer or gift) or
invite readers to join groups, but don’t go crazy with the
required fields. A too-long subscribe form might scare
people off.
Tell subscribers what to expect. Whether you plan
to send company updates, letters from the president, e-
commerce sales, daily deals, or weekly tips, it’s important to
tell your readers what to expect and how often to expect it.
Give them as much information as possible on your signup
form, so they can decide whether they want to be on the list
or not.
Send a welcome email. It’s always smart to remind
people why they’re on your list and reassure them that good
things are in store. You might even send new subscribers a
special offer or exclusive content, as your way of thanking
them for their loyalty.
Design your newsletter to fit your brand. Your
email campaigns should match your brand’s look and feel. If
you’re using a template, you might want to customize it to

2. include your company’s colors and logo in the header. If
your emails are consistent with the rest of your company’s
content, then readers will feel more familiar from the start.
Make it scannable. Your subscribers are busy people
who get a lot of email, so it’s safe to assume you don’t have
their undivided attention. Instead of one long block, break
up your content into short paragraphs. Include subheadings
and images to guide readers through your email and make it
easier to scan, and add a teaser to the top of your newsletter
to tell subscribers what’s in store. If you’re sending a long
article, consider inserting a “read more” link so people can
get to the rest when it’s convenient for them. Your subject
line should be to-the-point and easy to digest, too. You
might even want to a/b test subject lines to see which ones
perform best.
Send people content they want. Email newsletter
services offer features like groups and segmentation to help
you make your content relevant to the people reading it. If
you’re sending different emails for different groups (for
example, a nonprofit might send separate emails to
volunteers, donors, and the board of directors), then you can
ask people to check a box to join a particular group on your
signup form. Segmentation allows you to target certain
subscribers on your list without assigning them to group. If
your store is having a sale, then you could send a campaign
only to people near a particular zip code, because
subscribers who live in other parts of the world don’t need to
know about it. You can also segment by activity, email
clients, e-commerce data, and more. Sending relevant
content will keep your readers engaged, and engaged
readers look forward to your newsletter and share it with
friends.

3. Keep a publishing calendar. A regular newsletter is a
commitment. If you go several months without sending
anything, then your subscribers will forget about you, and
they’ll be more likely to delete the next email, or worse,
mark it as spam. Make time to plan, write, design, and send
your newsletters regularly.
Edit. Even editors need editors. When you’re working on
your publishing calendar, leave plenty of time for the editing
and revision process. Once you send a campaign, it goes
straight to the inbox, and you can’t go back and update it.
Newsletters contain meaningful content, and sloppy ones
reflect poorly on the companies who send them. Grammar
and style are just as important for email as they are for
websites and blogs.
Test. Different email clients and mobile devices display
emails differently. Send test emails to colleagues, or use a
testing program to make sure your emails are going to look
good on screens big and small. Testing reveals design
mistakes before it’s too late, and testing programs can
predict whether or not a campaign will get caught in a spam
filter. You could even set up accounts with a few different
email services for easy testing. Avoid sending one big image
as a campaign, and cover your bases with a plain-text option
for every email.
Know your spam rules. A lot of innocent people send
spam because they didn’t know any better. Read up on
the CAN-SPAM act to avoid any trouble. Put simply, you’re
allowed to send bulk email only to people who specifically
asked to be on your mailing list. If you collected email
addresses for a lunch giveaway or an event invitation, then
you don’t have permission to send marketing emails unless

4. you made that clear at signup. Include an obvious
unsubscribe link in every email, and don’t forget to remind
subscribers how they got on your list in the first place.