Starting Your Own Newsletter

All successfull businesses today use the power of Newsletter to reach both new prospects as well as maintain relationship with existing customers. A simple web capture form is used to capture email id and may be a name of the prospect. A auto-responder then takes care of sending automated email messages once your site user provides his email id.

  

Do's

 

Always give your contact details, an email id or phone no and even your business address. Now most people start out an Internet business from home and may be uncomfortable letting their home address. In my experience it wouldn't matter much even if you don't give your address. This of course varies based on nature of your business. If you are in business of providing information business (ebooks, audio, etc) which can be delivered via internet, then people most of time will directly get in touch with you over the phone or email. Besides, a home address makes people feel they are not dealing with a professional business.

 

Give an option to user to un-subscribe from your newsletter. I have personally felt frustated on not being able to locate the un-subscribe link on some newsletters I don't know when I subscribed. And this strategy backfires as well, because people are eventually going to find out how to un-subscribe and they will think you are dodgy and never come back.

 

Keep your newsletters short and concise- people don't like to read long emails. Or if you have to, break it down in various sections and put a full version online for their perusal.

 

Expanding above, it's always good to also maintain your newsletter emails somewhere on your website. This way your customers can always refer back and it sort of becomes a library.

  

Always let user know what they can expect in your newsletter and indicative frequency. You can also let them view samples of past newsletters before they subscribe.

  

Give them a choice to receive text or html newsletter. There are still users who doesn't have a system capable of reading html, and some users just like plain content than any flashy images. So to reach maximum audience, create two versions of it.

 

Don'ts

Never send out newsletter with sole purpose of advertising your product on-the-face. Nobody likes to be directly sold. Instead write an informative article describing the problem your product solves and then leave a link to your product page.

Do a spell check before you send newsletter, check if you have put subject line, your facts are accurate and what you write in general makes sense.

Always send newsletter inline with frequency, if you said it will be monthly, don't start sending daily ones.