Keeping your potential customers up-to-date with your products and services is essential to retain and progress your prospects. Email newsletters are an effective way to achieve this, getting the design of the newsletter right is easy, getting your newsletter sent is the tricky part due to the rise in SPAM, sending your newsletter needs to be done right. There are various tool available for sending bulk email, out of our experience the most effective are Email Service Providers (ESP) who send bulk email from their servers. The checklist below gives some of the factors that need to be taken into account before sending
- Authenticate your sending domain by setting up Sender ID and DomainKeys/DKIM on your sending domain name
- Ensure that the email addresses you are targetting have given you explicit permission to email them
- Make your subscribe form double opt-in, meaning subscribers need to validate their interest by clicking on a link, this reduces SPAM complaints when sending
- Ensure your lists are kept clean by managing soft/hard bounces
- Always include your company information, permission reminder (how did this person end up on your email list) and an unsubscribe link
Our favourite tool for sending bulk email is Campaign Monitor, which does the above and will also integrate into Google Analytics to keep you informed of who clicks on what.