Hello,
I'm Mervi Eskelinen!
An artist, nerd and sorcerer, dedicated to make world softer and better for everyone, and to get you to make more art. Make art, change the world!
What not to do with your newsletter
Email newsletters are quite a big thing. Yes, they are. You might think they would've died due to all the blogging and social media and whatnot. But in reality newsletters have gotten perhaps bigger due to all these "new" things.
Being delivered straight to the recipients inbox without commitment of being a "friend" or a "follower", newsletters are an easy way to reach those who are drowning to all the information everywhere else. At least it's easy, if you are the subscriber. You can unsubscribe any time (read more below), you can trash the email without reading it, you can read it later and, oh my, all the things you can do.
Not everyone loves them though and not every newsletter gains those thousands of subscribers. Of course unsubscribing happens now and then. Most importantly lots of folks are doing something or everything wrong with their email newsletters.
Previously I have listed a couple of things to do with your newsletter. This time I go with what NOT to do.
Share the same content as everywhere else
Most email newsletters are only echoes of content the author shared somewhere (or everywhere) else. Instead of making the subscribers feel special they just tell how the new post is up on the blog and whatnot. That information most are getting elsewhere, by subscribing to your RSS feed, following you on Twitter or liking your page on Facebook, to mention some.
Even if you are sharing the same content I do recommend adding something special. Another story about the same subject (urging then to read the blog post as well). Perhaps a story about something else by the side of the link to that new blog post.
There's a slight exception to this: The RSS feed driven emails. In case your subscribers have chosen so (make sure they have) you can send them your blog content without any special stuff. That however must be their choice and it must be made clear what the list is about when they subscribe to it.
Fail to mention how they got on your list
Recently I started to receive daily emails from something called Open Sky. I had no clue why I was getting these emails. Luckily for them I'm not the kind of scream "SPAM SPAM SPAM" the moment I get these emails.
First I tried to check the email for the clue of why I was on the list. Because it wasn't told there, I went on to ask about it on Twitter. No reply. Finally I realized to search my inbox for Open Sky. And there it was! It appeared that Open Sky has something to do with Design You Trust and yes, I'm on their list by choice.
Not that I'm very happy about somehow being on this other list, now I at least know why. Perhaps if I'd known this from the start I wouldn't have been so upset about it. Yes, I unsubscribed.
Never ever forget to mention somewhere in your newsletter how your subscribers got on that list, why they are receiving these emails. It won't make everyone happy (especially in cases such as mentioned above), but at least it's better than not knowing at all.
Make unsubscribing impossible of difficult
Most newsletter services require a unsubscribe link within your email. Don't fail to place it in the bottom of the email, even if your service or other email sending method didn't require it. If your subscribers cannot unsubscribe from your newsletters they will complain and start to mark your emails as spam. That's bad for your reputation and your emails will start to land everyone's spam boxes after a while.
Another failure is to make unsubscribing difficult or very slow. Yelp for instance takes a while to unsubscribe from all those emails they start to send you the moment you sign up to the service. It's frustrating to get the emails even after unsubscribing from them. Another reason to send them all the way to spam.
Relay on images
It depends on what sort of newsletter you are sending, but adding too many images can be really bad for it. For one reason not everyone will enable the images. Therefore they'll never see all those images, just a really ugly email with placeholders all over the place.
Many commercial newsletters are made of only or mostly images. Their text content is in images too. When the images aren't enabled none of the messages they are trying to send are being seen. Additionally the images containing text may be difficult or impossible to read for those who have any eye problems. The screen readers cannot read the text on images, thus the content will be missed.
Use small text size
Similarly as text size on your website needs to be big enough for reading the text size on your email needs to be bigger too. Some emails I receive use this text size that's barely readable.
Small text size makes your email look bad and it makes it difficult to read. It will also make your email look like it's made solely of "the small print". That's not good.
Send lots of emails
Didn't I just get an email from this same place yesterday? I'm pretty sure I did. Oh yeah there it is! In my inbox, not read yet. Okay, unsubscribe and thanks bye.
Don't send too many emails. Don't send emails every day of the week. Once a week is okay, if you actually have something so send. Anything more is pure spam. Even the RSS feed driven emails can usually be set to be sent for instance once a week. It's much better than sending an email every time you blog in case you blog more than once a week.
Take it too seriously
People will subscribe and they will unsubscribe. Sometimes things go wrong, you mess something up or your newsletter service messes something up. Or perhaps the email service or app your subscriber uses is broken.
Best way to bounce back from situations is to use some humour. Your marketing is serious, I'm sure. Yet you need to take it a bit less seriously in order to keep your blood pressure down and not to scare everyone off.
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