Marketing Monday - eNewsletters, what not to do!

I get a lot of newsletters from different businesses, as well as send newsletters. To be honest, I was thinking of making this a Friday Five report, however figured it was too important, so decided to make it free.

Here are some things you should not do in your email newsletter and why:

1. From address - have the from address of your newsletter a newsletter from your domain and NOT a hotmail address. With the number of emails I receive, there is a high chance your newsletter will end up in spam and not get read.
2. Free newsletter accounts - if you must use free mailing list software, make sure the first thing people see when they get the newsletter is not an ad for someone else! I have a little alert that pops up with the first line of the email that arrives, and if I see an ad for someone I don’t know, the email is likely to end up deleted or in spam - either way, it doesn’t get read.
3. No content - please, make your  newsletters interesting with content. This could be anything from a free reprint article to the story behind a product to announcements of new products. If there is no content in your newsletter, people are likely to unsubscribe.
4. Whole newsletter an image - this is something that irritates me because more often than not, the text appears blurry. A friend was telling me that her email program is set to block images in emails, so she can’t even read them! Sure, these newsletters look pretty, but they are very hard to read.
5. Just adding me - OK, this is not only really annoying, but is also against the Australian Spam laws - I hate it when people just add me to their email lists! And how do I know? Usually they add the email that I send them an email (either they’ve subscribed to my list or I’ve replied to an enquiry) or they’ve got the address off my site. This is not the email I usually use to join email lists.

These are just a few of the things I recommend people don’t do in email newsletters. Email newsletters are a fantastic marketing tool, if they are used right.

If you would like some ideas on newsletter content, check out this Friday Five Report. You can also get free reprint articles from The RepOZitory, the Aussie Article Bank.

I hope these tiips will help you with your newsletter and help you to keep subscribers and readers.