Email newsletters

We run newsletters on Campaign Monitor and Mailchimp, and either is fine for a small business. Setting one up properly means a template that looks like the rest of your business, a sign-up that actually appears where customers might use it, and the technical groundwork that stops the whole thing landing in junk folders.

That last part is worth dwelling on, because a newsletter that goes to the junk folder has cost you exactly as much to produce as one that arrives. Mail providers now judge whether a sender can be trusted, and the records that prove your mail is genuinely yours have to be right before the first send rather than after somebody notices the figures are poor.

The difference between a newsletter that works and one that stops being opened is who receives it rather than what it says. A company that sends the same message to everybody starts to annoy people; before long, your recipients begin to hit delete without even a glance at what you’re selling.

The better version uses what you already know. Order data can tag people by what they have bought, so the customers who buy one kind of thing hear about that kind of thing, trade customers and retail customers get different messages, and somebody who bought a fortnight ago is not urged to buy the same item again. None of that requires anybody to export a spreadsheet or maintain a list by hand once it has been set up.

Most newsletters fail because nobody had time to write one, not because the idea was wrong. We write them as well as send them, which for a lot of clients is the only reason the newsletter goes out at all.

Tell us whether you have a list already, how you have been reaching customers so far, and roughly how often you would want to send something. If the honest answer is that there is a list somewhere from four years ago that nobody has touched, that is usually still worth having.