Newsletters
Engaging with your customers is good. You want them to know about specials, discounts, new products and services, and interesting events. The problem is getting the word out. Sure you can (and must!) post the news on your site, but not all your customers will visit regularly enough to find out.
The solution is for you to “push out” the information to them. That means email.
For many businesses this evolves slowly and organically. You’ll probably have a list of names in Outlook, Gmail or Outlook Express. After a while you might organise a distribution list and add names to that. You should certainly at least hide the recipient names from each other by adding them to the BCC (blind carbon copy) field. Eventually you’ll discover that Outlook won’t send more than 80 emails at a time. So perhaps you”ll start sending in batches.
I’m sure you can see where this is going: Your email system gets clogged. You’re manually adding and subtracting names. Perhaps you want to add some graphics so it looks like a real newsletter. And what about mail-merge so you can address your customers by name ? Send too many emails in this way and servers may start assessing your email address as a spammer – especially if you don’t include an unsubscribe link. In many parts of the world an unsubscribe link is now a legal requirement for bulk mail.
If you want to move up to a real newsletter there are several different routes. Some of the solutions we provide include:
1) Install a dedicated bulk email application on your hosting server
A recommended open source application is PHPlist. Basically you install it, create a database for your subscribers; create one or more email templates for your messages, and create a subscribe and unsubscribe link on your website. The email is sent using the resources of your hosting package. A good hosting package may send up to 8000 emails per hour and handle all the associated bounces, subscriptions, unsubscriptions, blacklist etc. You will also be able to see how many people opened the email, when, and whether they clicked on any of your links.
2) Use a dedicated desktop application
This is like any other desktop application: you install it on your PC, configure the options with your email server information, design a template and start sending. Again this is powered by your own hosting package. This means that you’ll need to be sure your host allows bulk email sending – and if they do, check whether it’s “throttled” to a particular rate. It’s no good having 4000 people on your newsletter database if you can only send 100 an hour. A good desktop newsletter application costs around $200 as a one-time purchase. It then needs to be configured and customised.
3) Use an online bulk mail service
There are quite a few good online services. They’re all slightly different. Some have a basic level service which is free, but branded. Others charge a set fee plus a cost per email (typically 2 or 3 cents each); others charge a monthly fee on a sliding scale depending on how many addresses you have in your database. A database of 4000 people might cost around $70 per month for unlimited emails. That may seem a lot, but the online services have several advantages. First, they use their own servers to send the email. That means it has an extremely good chance of reaching your customers without being marked as “spam” and held. These services specialise in high delivery rates. They also offer many ways to customise your newsletters, uploads of your own designs, detailed analytics of each message’s success, the ability to create sub-groups from your master list etc etc. Features too numerous to mention as they say ! Of course you’ll still need to integrate the service on your website with a signup form. Don’t forget to offer some encouragement such as the promise of discount coupons. (We can easily set up a system where new subscribers are issued with a one-use-only discount code to use on your site with their next purchase).
In each of these categories there are many more nuanced options. This is merely a broad outline. But there’s no doubt that email newsletters are one of the best ways to keep your customers in touch and interested in your business. Each newsletter will typically give you a big spike of visitors to your site. It’s then up to the effectiveness of your site as to whether you convert these visitors into sales and revenue. And also whether you can convert a percentage into regular site visitors.
