If your email will feature news or advice, will you be able to produce enough content to make it worthwhile to your recipients?

If your staff are knowledgeable in your business area then this could be worthwhile, especially if it is a niche area that an external company may not be able to write about easily.

Don’t forget that while using an employee to write an email may appear cheaper, if they are distracted from money making or important tasks; it could actually work out more costly than paying an external company!
 
External

Paying an external company to produce your content will usually ensure that you get good quality writing. The cost can often seem quite high, but generally you pay for quality.

Depending on the focus of your email, you may need to use different writing companies. A sales email will need different writing skills to an informative content email, and one company may not have them all.

You will need to establish who owns the copyright to the content; as if the external company retains it you may end up paying again to re-use it. In most cases you will also be responsible for taking the finished content and inserting it into the email.
 
Email Format

One of the most common questions we get on email marketing is whether you should send your emails in html (website language) or as plain text files. The answer will depend on what you wish your newsletter to do:
 
Html

Html is the main language that web pages are written in, and using it for your email means you can lay out your email like a webpage. This makes it much more attractive, and encourages more interaction from your recipients.

Html does have some disadvantages; while almost all email software or facilities can view html emails, a number of people choose not receive them as they are more vulnerable to viruses and other intrusions. It is also more complicated to put together than a basic text email, if you do not have any web staff to do so you may struggle to create one in-house.
 
Text

Plain text emails are small and simple, they are easy to put together and can be received by anyone with email facilities. They do however have several big problems; links are not always clickable, design and layout are severely limited, and they do not encourage interaction as much as html emails.
 
Solution

One solution is to use an email which allows both html and text emails to be sent together, and whichever is the right type for the recipient is shown. This means that everyone can see the email, but those who view html emails can get the more visual version.

The main problem with this is that you either need to have an employee who is very skilled with web coding, or use an external mailing or design service. It does also mean your emails are larger which may cause problem if you send to people who view them using PDA’s or similar devices with slower connections.
 
Sending

The simplest way to send your emails to a small number of addresses is to simply go into Outlook or your email software and send them manually. However, once you get over 100 or so emails you may wish to consider using an external service to send them through.

There are a number of web based services, where you pay a monthly fee (Usually starting from £5-15 per month depending on features) and a small amount for every set number of emails you send. For this money you can often get useful statistics, such as those which track (in html emails) how many people open it, and what links people click on.

Some of these web based services also provide you with the necessary web coding to add to your website which allows email addresses to be added straight to your list.

If you have your email created by an external company, many of these will also manage the sending of the emails; although you are likely to pay a little extra for this service.
 
Avoiding Spam Filters

Although by following legal guidelines you are not ‘spamming’, there is still a big problem with email providers using automatic email scanning software (filters) which may think your email is spam.

If a filter thinks your email is spam, it will be put into a junk email folder, not your recipient’s inbox; this means that it is much less likely to be read.

There are a number of factors that affect how a spam filter sees your email; most use a points system, adding points for every suspect word or feature that is included in the email, and moving it to junk mail after a certain total is reached. To avoid being caught you need to look at avoiding or limiting the use of words and features wherever possible.

Here are some examples of things that add points on most spam filters:

• Avoid typing words in CAPITAL LETTERS (caps) in your email unless absolutely necessary, especially in your subject line.
   
• Do not repeat symbols such as !!! or £££.
   

This means that you may often be forced to alter sentences to something less obvious to avoid words being added to your ‘spam points’ total.

One of the biggest difficulties in avoiding spam filters is that there are several different types, and each has different ways of working out what is suspected spam.


Article Index

1 Introduction
2 How to Collect Email Addresses
3 Example: BizHelp24
4 Legal Issues
5 How to Create Your Email
6 Monitoring Success
7 Links