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An e-mail newsletter is a great way to keep your potential customers up-to-date on your products or service and interested in your company. Building them has similarities with building a website allthough there are a few differences that need to be taken into account. There a a few standard elements in a newsletter that will not change.

1. Fundamentals

• Logo
  Whether the newsletter is for a particular brand or your company as a whole, your visual logo is important so people have instant awareness of who you are
• Contact Information
  A telephone number, email address or some way for people to contact you
• Unsubscribe Link
  An absolute necessary, you may not want people unsubscribing from your newsletter but it shows good practice
• Header information
  Make sure you are consistent with each send with elements such as from address and name. If I was sending, I would use Tring Web Design <newsletter@tring-web-design.co.uk>
• Technicalities
  Make sure you have SPF (Sender Policy Framework) enabled on your domain, this will ensure better inbox sends

Other than that, content wise you can add as much or as little as you want. Do bear in mind that attention spans with e-mail newsletters are probably the same for websites, so you want to go for instant grab and attention. If you are highlighting a particular promotion for the period, make sure its the first thing readers see.

2. Construction

There is a massive gap between how you view a website in Firefox or Internet Explorer and how your email client displays emails. The latter involves email providers stripping out styles, header information and other stuff.

We are talking delivery here, widths and sizes. Just like the post office cant push through your postbox something that's bigger, readers of your newsletter can't view something if it's off-screen. Outlook has a preview pane and it can be configured in different ways, you also need to take into account screen sizes, look at 1024x768. Go for a width of around 500px to 550px, that should sit within the average width.

Stick with a simple table structure, all email clients will read it and avoids issues with CSS, more of that later. A split top row for logo and contact information, main content area, a footer row for other sales channels then unsubscribe and contact information outside of the table underneath.

3. CSS and Styling

Some ISP's strip out header information, the stuff above the BODY tag. If you are going to use CSS to style elements in your letter, make sure it's inline and not defined in the HEAD section.  Don't go too advanced, keep it simple. Image maps wont work.

4. Images

You may have noticed that when you get an email from something you have subscribed to, there may be a lot of red crosses around. This is default behaviour of some email clients that will block the downloading of remote images unless the sender is in their address book. To lessen this impact you can use images sparingly within your email. If you are a large company with a widespread recognition of your brand, you could probably get away with more rather than less.

5. Delivery

Once you have your letter it is time to send to your subscribers. There are various methods by which you can send your newsletter:

1. Avoid using Outlook
2. PHP scripts that use the mail() function. These are only useful for lists that have around 1000 subscribers, any more and the script will die. Loads can be found over at HotScripts.
3. A dedicated piece of desktop software. Groupmail is one of the leaders and I have used it for over 7 years to send out to lists upto 20,000. The major drawback is that sending to large lists can take a long time, over 7 hours for 20,000 subscribers. This is because you don't want to trip any spam mechanisms on ISP's mail servers which could end up getting you blacklisted.
4. If you have the money go for a dedicated web based solution, such as DotMailer or Yesmail. These services charge either as Pay as You Go or on a subscription basis. The main advantage is that they will whitelist your sending domain with all the major ISP's such as AOL, Hotmail and Yahoo. This gives peace of mind that your mailing will reach your audience. In addition sending to large lists doesn't take 7 hours and things such as bounces and unknown address returns are handled automatically using soft and hard rules.

6. Subscribers and Unsubscribers

Getting people onto your lists requires a mechanism that has a front end form, where they enter their email address, this adds them to the list but also send a confirmation email out before activating their subscription. This is done to ensure the email address is real and belongs to the subscriber. Allowing people to come off your list is a pre-requisite defined in the Data Protection Act. Normally you need to have a link at the bottom of each email you send out that allows people to click on it to remove them from the list.