Email Newsletters: best practice
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Consultant at Inside Digital
20 May 2005 10:05am
Hello everyone
As part of the forthcoming NEPA (Newsletter and Electric Publishers Association) event, I'll be doing a presentation on "A checklist for launching or improving an email newsletter program". I'm keen to get some feedback on my intended plan, as I am sure everyone else will be able to suggest and discuss 'hot issues' that I should be considering.
The provisional plan is to cover the following:
-
Data Management:
- Capturing data legally and compliantly
- Beyond the demographics: What information can you capture on recipients?
-
Message Design:
- Practical advice when formatting layout and design
- Format: Html and Text explained
- Attachments
- Sender addresses
-
Getting them delivered to the inbox. Publishers guide to ‘deliverability’:
- Spam filters
- Sender Certificates, White Lists & Black lists explained
-
Reporting & Refinement:
- What reporting possible and how is this information being used by publishers
The audience is a mixture of senior publishers and marketers so I need to blend in strategic research with practical lessons.Have I missed any key issues?More information about UK NEPA is here:
http://www.newsletters.org/page.cfm?name=uknepa
Thanks in advance
Paul
Paul.crabtree@adestra.com
www.adestra.co.uk
Director at Econsultancy
20 May 2005 12:38pm
Hi Paul
Depending on your audience, if they are just starting out you could consider the following:
Not sure if you have this covered in your Message Design section but consider 'Content' - Where is it coming from and do you have enough to sustain the number of campaigns you aim to send regularly?
Also...
'Response management' - often forgotten but an important factor as not all responses can/will be handled automatically, these can include issues as well as business leads being sent as a reply to the from address.
And finally...
Planning, strategy and integration with other media. E-mail newsletters should be used to inform and retain customers but can also be used to upsell and cross-sell, so from the perspective of improving a program it's probably worth a mention.
I guess it all depends on the time you have to present. Hope this helps.
Peter
ps
Could be worth checking out our Personalisation and Targeting Showcase June 2nd 2005.
http://www.e-consultancy.com/about/supplier-showcase/827/personalisation-and-targeting-platforms.html
E-marketing Trainer : Consultant : Author at Marketing Insights Limited
21 May 2005 07:26am
Hi Paul,
You might want to check this article I wrote in 2003 about Devising and Revising E-newsletters.
It has 20 decisions to step through.
I would start by looking at range of objectives and audience and would also have a section on selecting the right frequency.
Best wishes
http://www.marketing-insights.co.uk/wnimall.htm (See Aug/Oct 2003)
More recent at: http://www.davechaffey.com/E-marketing-Insights
Dave Chaffey
============
Internet Marketing trainer, consultant and author
Blog: www.davechaffey.com
account director at edcoms
23 May 2005 09:41am
You're covering capturing data legally and compliantly, but will you be going into how to incentivise people to subscribe - and to give as much useful personal details about themselves as they can? Some best practice advice on encouraging registration and subscription would be a valuable addition.
On 10:05:31 20 May 2005 PaulCrabtreeAdestra wrote:
Consultant at Inside Digital
23 May 2005 09:59am
Hi Sophie
Thanks for this- I think you're right.
I work with a lot of publishers at present including T & F Informa, Oxford University Press and Jane's Information Group and between them they have tried many different things which means I'll be able to bring in some really practical insight.
It all comes down to a number of key questions to me:
- Data Capture:
Form design: what are best practice lay-outs and techniques to capture clean data?
- Incentives:
And of course, as part of this, the main aspect needs to be ensuring every step is measurable
Indeed, on my own site, www.adestra.co.uk we provide a best practice newsletter for email marketers with no incentive but good free content! With a testing program underway, I'm sure I'll be tweaking it as I go along!
Thanks also to everyone else who has so far contributed some thoughts for me. Really appreciate it.
Thanks
Paul
Paul.crabtree@adestra.com
www.adestra.co.uk
On 09:41:33 23 May 2005 sophiebessemer wrote:
Partner at Keymail Marketing Limited
23 May 2005 14:04pm
Can I suugest you have a look at our website on the whitepapers page as you may be able to pull some useful info off there
http://email.exacttarget.com/best-practices-whitepapers.asp
Regards
Jeff Barnes ExactTarget
On 10:05:31 20 May 2005 PaulCrabtreeAdestra wrote:
>Hello everyone
>
>As part of the forthcoming NEPA (Newsletter and Electric
>Publishers Association) event, I'll be doing a
>presentation on "A checklist for launching or
>improving an email newsletter program". I'm
>keen to get some feedback on my intended plan, as I am
>sure everyone else will be able to suggest and discuss
>'hot issues' that I should be considering.
>
>The provisional plan is to cover the following:
>
>- Data Management:- Capturing data legally and compliantly
>
>- Beyond the demographics: What information can you
>capture on recipients?
>
>- Message Design:- Practical advice when formatting layout
>and design
>
>- Format: Html and Text explained
>
>- Attachments
>
>- Sender addresses
>
>- Getting them delivered to the inbox. Publishers guide to
>‘deliverability’:- Spam filters
>
>- Sender Certificates, White Lists & Black lists
>explained
>
>- Reporting & Refinement:- What reporting possible and
>how is this information being used by publishers
>
>The audience is a mixture of senior publishers and
>marketers so I need to blend in strategic research with
>practical lessons.Have I missed any key issues?More
>information about UK NEPA is here:
>
>(http://www.newsletters.org/page.cfm?name=uknepa)
>http://www.newsletters.org/page.cfm?name=uknepa
>
>Thanks in advance
>
>Paul
>
>(mailto:Paul.crabtree@adestra.com)
>Paul.crabtree@adestra.com
>
>(http://www.adestra.co.uk) www.adestra.co.uk
Director at www.broadbandgenie.co.uk
24 May 2005 06:57am
Director at WSI
24 May 2005 10:47am
Hi
One area I would include is 'Integrating the Call-Hadling Process into working practices'.
I do a lot of work in Internet Marketing, from websites, etc. A large area of my work involves how clients will deal with the responses from their campaigns. What is the process, what is the lifecycle, who is responsible, what needs to be put in place, how are we measuring results, what ROI are we generating?
Hope this helps.
Regards
Stuart Walker stuart@wsidynamicwebsystems.com
www.wsidynamicwebsystems.com
On 09:41:33 23 May 2005 sophiebessemer wrote:
Consultant at Inside Digital
24 May 2005 11:21am
Hi Stuart
Thanks for this. You're right!
The resourcing of any responses is always something that many people forget to consider.
As well as manning phone lines, one of the main examples of this, is when no resource is allocated to the processing of inbound messages. Amongst out of office messages etc, there are often some real gems- We often find people trying to order products by replying which are often ignored!
In Adestra's email system, Adestra's Message Focus, we've included some inbound filtering tools to make it easier to find these replies, Mr Angry's etc. This ensures clients find those orders asap!
I'll make sure I include this in the presentation
Thanks to everyone for their input so far- great food for thought.
Paul
Paul.Crabtree@adestra.com
http://www.adestra.co.uk
On 10:47:14 24 May 2005 StuartW wrote:
VP Email and Analytics at Agency.com
24 May 2005 17:28pm
Paul:
There are several key things I focus on when speaking on this topic.
Essentially the 4 Ps
Publishing: Sadly, most email marketers lose sight of the importance of putting editorial standards on publishing newsletters and content is based on last minute thought. Very few have a calender, editorial process or have more than 1 newsletter on file or planned out..
Production: Many elements of email and newsletters are lost in production, bad code, bad design, bad approach. I speak about the importance of eliminating all the production elements so the message doesn't fail before it gets there.
Personality: Newsletters are very typically very stale. What has made traditional news publishing valuable and the most success in email is the ability to personality and tone into the newsletters. THey must be interesting, have good tone, be contextual and inline with the community.
Patience: A newsletter is an iterative process and anyone who takes on publshing an email newsletter should have patience in how they setup testing, how they setup segmentation and how they want to apply learning. You can't do everything at once.
The value of the newsletter can be measured in many intangible ways, fact is we can only measure it directly based on how we treat things differently and control what we are testing.. So don't try new subject lines, new content, new creative and new timing all at once unless you are versed in multi-variate analysis..
Many more good thoughts. but this is what I preach.....
Deliverability, Segmentation, Testing, Monitoring, Quality Assurance, Reporting and Analysis, Response Modeling are other things I speak to.
On 10:05:31 20 May 2005 PaulCrabtreeAdestra wrote: