A few months ago, I wrote a post offering a few suggestions for your newsletter template. Even if you are sure your template is awesome, you might have dismal open rates. People have different ideas about what a “good” open rate is. I had a client at one point who was perfectly satisfied with an open rate that was consistently around 15%. The average for my clients is around 30%. I’ve talked to business owners who have open rates above 90%.

Most people worry  more about how many addresses make up their lists than about how many people actually read their newsletters. It is better to have a list of 20 people with an 80% open rate than a list of 1000 people with a 10% open rate. You are far more likely to find that email marketing works for you if you begin with a smaller list of people who really want to hear from you, than you are if you

image courtesy of The Marmot via flickr.

begin with a list of hundreds who might have heard of you.

If you do it right, your list will grow. People will open, read, and, most importantly, respond to your newsletter. It’s the getting-it-right part that is hard. A few tips to help you keep your carefully-crafted newsletter out of the trash:

You use it like a sales circular. I subscribe to a newsletter from a local pet supply store. Every single week, they send out an email to advertise A BIG WEEKEND SALE!!! Things like 10% off all gerbil food do not excite me. After two or three weeks, I stopped opening it.

It’s okay to use your newsletter to let people know if you are offering a special or a discount, but don’t make that the only thing your newsletter does. It’s boring – especially when your “sales” are only going to appeal to a tiny segment of your subscriber list. Make sure that any offer you make will have broad appeal, and that there are, at least sometimes, other reasons to open your newsletters.

It’s all about YOU. One of the biggest reasons to use email marketing is that it builds your relationships with your customers. It gives them a small window into your company’s culture, or even a chance to know more about you personally. People are easily bored, though. Relationships require balance. When every issue is about you, but you never address your readers’ needs, values, or priorities, they are going to quit opening.

The key to avoiding this mistake is to make sure you are writing with your ideal customer in mind. Write as if you are having a conversation with that person. There’s nothing wrong with letting your customers get to know you – just make sure you are  keeping them in mind.

It’s the same thing, again and again. There have been so many times I’ve subscribed to newsletters and been delighted with the first 4 or 5 issues that hit my inbox. Then, after a couple of months, less delighted. Then, bored. If every issue is an interesting personal anecdote, followed by a customer testimonial, with a great coupon only for newsletter subscribers at the bottom, people are going to get bored.

When you find a combination that works, it’s tempting to stick with it. What you need, though, are four or five or six combinations that work. Keep surprising your subscribers and you will keep them interested. Send a link to a news article related to what you do, then a personal story, then a product offering, then a link to a video about your company. Try keeping a log of ideas, so that you always have something to turn to when it’s time to write the next issue, and so that you have a place to keep up with “extra” content for the future.

You need a proofreader. Everyone makes mistakes. I’ve re-read this post approximately 50 times and found a mistake every time. Feel free to point out those I miss in the comments – because I’m sure I will miss some. However, when your newsletter is so riddled with misspellings and poor grammar that it makes my head hurt and my pulse race, I’m going to stop torturing myself by reading it.

There are people, ahem, who will proofread your stuff for a small fee. If you lack confidence in your writing skills, paying someone to proofread or edit your newsletter is well worth the money. No matter how laid-back your customers are, you can bet there is at least one grammar nut on your subscriber list. You can sell her stuff, too, if she is not so annoyed with you she fails to see what you are selling.

You are overwhelming. Smarter people than I have done studies that show you can send email to your list daily and not suffer a significant drop in subscribers. If you send me stuff daily, or even every-other-daily, I’m going to unsubscribe. First I’m going to delete everything you send me without ever looking at it for a couple of weeks, then I’m going to unsubscribe.

There are a few types of newsletters that can get by with daily sends, but not many. You have to gauge the tolerance of your subscribers for yourself. Sometimes weekly works perfectly, sometimes bi-weekly, and for some businesses, sending randomly works best. You can do some testing, and you can even ask your subscribers their preference.

There’s nothing personal. I love Mini Coopers. I used to own one and hope to own another some day. When I learned that Mini had a newsletter, I was excited, but the excitement faded within a couple of issues. There was just nothing in them that I could relate to. Once, there was a link to a blog written by someone who was testing an electric mini, and that was interesting, but that was the only thing that got my attention in ONE YEAR of receiving the newsletter.

The scope was just too big. Mini has an international audience, and their newsletter attempts to appeal to lots of different kinds of people. It rarely has anything in it about the cars, or about the people who drive them. It is clearly written by a large marketing department for a large audience. Mini would be better served by email marketing by making their newsletters more relatable. If you are running a small business, embrace the fact that email marketing is personal.

There are plenty of other reasons newsletters fail. Do you have an email pet peeve? What is one of the worst mistakes you have encountered in your inbox?

Your email newsletter design is similar to your business card design. You need it to grab attention, deliver information and make the person looking at it want to know more. While I am a writer, not a designer, I have looked at hundreds of email newsletter templates, and I’ve seen some really bad ones. Here are a few reasons your email newsletter template sucks:

1. It’s ginormous. If all I see on the screen when I open your newsletter is the name of your company in five-inch-tall bold lettering, I’m annoyed. I have no idea if I want to even make the effort to move my finger and scroll down. Usually, I just hit delete. Sorry.

If I do go to the trouble of scrolling, and your font is so big that I have to keep scrolling and keep scrolling to read your content, I’m going to be annoyed. Annoyed prospects are less likely to buy from you. I know how to adjust the size of the text on my screen, so you really don’t have to make the text of your newsletter huge.

2. The colors are painful. Just because you can make the background orange and the text blue, doesn’t mean you should. In fact, when you do those kinds of things, your newsletter appears unprofessional. Color is fun. Fonts are fun. But they are also dangerous.

If you want orange in your newsletter, try using it in a border. If you want to use a “fun” font, use it in a title. Otherwise, you risk making your message harder to read, and people are busy. They are not going to put in any extra effort to read something that makes their heads hurt.

There are people who will help you design a template for future use, and their services are often reasonably priced. Get in touch. I’ll be happy to help you come up with something functional that won’t cause your prospects pain.

3. Your images are weird. If you don’t know how to manipulate images so that they don’t appear flattened or stretched when you put them in your newsletter, you might want to consider leaving them out. The best thing to do is invest a little time in learning how to make them work. Most email distribution services have great tutorials and help sections on their sites, and quite a few have really good customer services reps who will help you by phone.

4. Columns. Or lack of columns. Personally, I like two columns, but personal preference varies. Some folks don’t like columns at all, and that is fine, though a table of contents or a “what’s in this issue” section is nice. However you decide to go, make sure it’s easy to navigate your newsletter and that it’s easy to see whatever you want recipients to see.

Do you want people to click through to your site? Then make sure the link is obvious. Want people to “like” your page on Facebook? Then don’t bury a link to your page at the bottom of your newsletter. When you have too much “filler,” you end up with clutter, and then people don’t even see your wonderful offer or your excellent article.

There are lots of reasons to market by email. There are not many excuses for sending out horrible newsletters. Before you even begin putting together a template, you should think about your reasons for sending a newsletter at all. What do you want to accomplish? How can your template help you achieve that goal?

Of course, all of this ranting could just be evidence of my steadily increasing crotchetiness. Do you find horrible email design an assault to your inbox? Maybe other people love seeing all the bright colors and nifty fonts. Please, chime in. I’m curious if this bugs other people, too.

Last Thursday, I was lucky enough to have time to participate in the Hub Spot webinar, The Science of Email Marketing. I say “participate” because Hub Spot did a great job of integrating Twitter into the experience, encouraging people to comment and ask questions using the hash tag #emailsci.  The information presented challenged much of what I have learned about email marketing, both through experience and from other sources.

For example, way back, a whole 2 years ago, when I first started writing email newsletters, the company I worked for presented statistical evidence that the best day to send marketing email messages is Tuesday. Mondays are too busy, they said, and on Fridays everyone is bored and tired of working, and obviously, no one is working on the weekends.  Hub Spot, though, surveyed 95 million email users and found the highest click thru rates occur on the weekends.

In my experience, the best day to send your email is different and it totally depends on  your audience and your business. For example, I have one client who builds custom furniture and sends out a monthly newsletter. His open rates are much higher if it goes out on the weekend. However, I have another client who sells plants wholesale to garden centers, landscapers and the like. He sends out a weekly newsletter. His open rates tend to be better during the week.

It should be noted, however, that the Hub Spot statistics focused on the click thru rates, not the open rates. Obviously, if your recipients are clicking on your links, they are more engaged and that is great.  But my own experience – personal and professional – tells me that it’s the open rate that is more important here.

Personally, I read lots of emails but don’t always click the links in them. Professionally, I send email newsletters for a wide range of businesses and some of the most successful sales campaigns have happened through newsletters that didn’t get a lot of clicks. Of course, my clients generally have very small lists so my observations apply to really small companies. Hub Spot probably consults with much larger companies.

Another interesting conclusion of Hub Spot’s survey was that 88% of those surveyed do not separate work and personal email, which seems connected to the previous statement about click thru rates on the weekends. I don’t care how many people they surveyed – I doubt the veracity of this one.

People who work for corporations, as administrative professionals, or other sort of “regular” jobs do not like working on the weekends, even if that work is opening emails. I know this because I’ve had a good many of those jobs. When I was an administrative professional, I spent the weekend trying hard to forget about the office entirely. As a teacher, I worked on the weekends, but it was grading papers and writing lesson plans, and definitely NOT checking work-related email.

Finally, Hub Spot showed statistics that seemed to say there is not much risk of sending out too many emails. My issue with this one is purely personal. I will unsubscribe from any list that over-sends. The only exceptions (for me) are LivingSocial and Amazon. With LivingSocial, I knew I was signing up for daily emails, so that makes it okay. As for Amazon, I want certain things and to get them I have to put up with receiving a whole bunch of crap I do not want – especially at Christmas.  And to tell the truth, I delete 95% of the email I get from those two companies without looking at it.

One of my clients suffers from serious email overload. He wakes up to 100s of emails just about everyday, and feels that just about the only thing he has time to do is respond to email. In order to get that person to read your marketing email, you better be offering something he needs desperately. It seems rude to me to send something “just to keep your name out there” to people like him weekly or even daily.

What are your email behaviors? Will you click all the links? Do you separate your work and personal email? Do you prefer weekend emails? Is it possible to over-send to you?

If you cringe when you hear the phrase “online marketing strategy” this post is for you. The fact that some slimy sales people or as they like to call themselves, “gurus,” use the phrase doensn’t mean you should ignore it.  Some business owners are beginning to invest money in online advertising, as they should. But, it’s a good idea to have some kind of plan when you are investing your company’s money in anything, including marketing.

Whether you call it a plan or a strategy doesn’t matter, but having an idea of why you are doing the things you are doing is essential. Thinking about where you are going to market can provide you with a map forward much like a to-do list. Start your plan with just one or two marketing activities – a blog and a Facebook Page, for example, or an email newsletter and a regular feature on your site. You don’t have to – and shouldn’t – try to do everything at once. You will want to judge the effectiveness of each piece of your plan.

Besides deciding which forms of marketing you are going to use on which platforms, you should also consider how you want different types of marketing to work together. For online marketing, the ideal is to have everything directing traffic back to your own web site. Obviously, your web site needs to be up-to-date, display fresh content regularly and offer something worthwhile.

Your newsletter and Facebook Page are great ways to remind people you are in business and have something they might need. They are also great ways to spread the word about what you are doing. It is unrealistic to expect your stuff to “go viral,” but a client may have a friend who needs just what you have and will forward a link.

Throwing stuff online willy nilly is not the best way to promote your business, though. As with most things in life, consistency is important. If your clients sign up for your monthly newsletter, but you forget to send it half the time, what does that say? That you aren’t conscientious? That deadlines don’t mean much to you?

Don’t get me wrong, I don’t think most people are sitting around waiting on email newsletters. Actually, I think it’s quite the opposite: most people forget about you until they get that newsletter or see your post in a Facebook or Twitter stream. But maybe a past customer needs something you sell, they think of you, then think, “I haven’t seen a newsletter from her in ages! I wonder if she’s still in business?” That’s not good. No one should have to wonder if you are still in business.

As you add pieces to your marketing mix, ask yourself why you are doing so. If someone told you that you should be on Twitter, do a little research and decide for yourself it Twitter really will be a good way to reach your audience. Then, decide if you have the time to commit to really participating and if Twitter will fit in with your other marketing activities.

Lately, I’ve been doing quite a bit of marketing and several questions keep coming up: Where do you get a list of email addresses to send to? What should I put in my newsletter? How often should I send it out? What is a good open rate?

There are more, of course, but these almost always come up in the first conversation about an email newsletter so I’m going to post a series here to help anyone who is thinking about starting a newsletter.

Your List

Most of my clients didn’t have “a list” when we started working together and one of the first questions is always “Who will I send this newsletter to?”

Start with your customers. Every time you sell something, mention your newsletter and ask if they would like to receive it. Take a look at your email contacts. Chances are, if you have done repeated business with someone you already have their email address. If you are a brick and mortar, put a sign up sheet on the counter. Believe it or not people will sign up!

Friends and family are great and at least some of them should probably be getting your newsletter, but they are not really your target market, are they? Email marketing is for existing customers, or people who have shown a clear indication they might become customers, or people who have specifically asked to hear from you.

I do not endorse the idea of sending newsletters to people who have not requested them. In fact, I strongly discourage it. It’s spam, and it violates the Golden Rule. If you feel that you must start off with a big list of what I call “unknowns” and a few of them open it, send out an autoresponder allowing them to subscribe. It should say something along the lines of:

If you would like to continue getting news and awesome offers from us in your inbox, please click the link below. We will never share your email address and want to make sure you really do want to hear from us before we send you anything else!

Your list my drop by half, but that’s okay. At least you are not spamming anyone anymore and you can rest assured that the folks who get your newsletter really do want it.

Once you feel more comfortable sending out your newsletter, you can add a sign up box on your web site and your Facebook Page, you can offer incentives for sharing your newsletter with friends and you can offer incentives to people when they sign up.  Your list will grow, and after a while the growth will be effortless. Most of my clients have about 5-10 new subscribers each month without doing anything.

A common misconception for small business owners is that you need a few hundred email addresses to get started. Really, it doesn’t matter how many you start with. No one knows but you, anyway. You aren’t going tell your customers, “There are only 12 subscribers to this newsletter.”

A small, organically grown list is the best kind. You are more likely to get referrals from a small, core group of people who really love your product or service. You can offer really great deals to your subscribers when you know there aren’t that many of them. It also helps you figure out what to say because you are more likely to be relaxed and conversational when you think you are only talking to a few people.

Check back for the next post in the series: What Do I Write About?