Have you started your email campaign for your business yet? What is keeping you from starting? How consistent do you want to be or are you with your newsletters? Are your goals realistic? Is the number of newsletters you want to create a month realistic? Are the subjects of your emails interesting to your audience? Are you worried about the cost of the email marketing services? What have you learned from newsletter sign ups that you have gotten (do you value the coupons or helpful tips, or did you find something they did annoying)?
These are great questions that you could and should answer at any point during email campaign, whether you are in the planning process or have been creating newsletters for years.
My newsletter sign up is pretty small. I just started it at the beginning of this year as a part of my personal business goals. My open rate for my newsletters is over 50% for each newsletter I’ve sent!! That is amazing!! The average “good open rate” is normally about 15-20% for any industry.
I am consistent with my delivery (the 2nd Thursday of every month between 7:30-8:30am), I write to my audience so they understand and not in techno jargon, and I try to keep it short, sweet and to the point.
Now to address the cost issue. I recommend MailChimp to all my clients and friends. They have a great FREE service for newsletters and they have webinars regularly for teaching you how to use MailChimp. As part of the FREE service, the newsletter you create can be sent to your Facebook Page, personal profile and a Twitter account. MailChimp also allows you to create a sign up on your Facebook Page and your website. They also have a large variety of templates that you can modify to make it your own. Also their help desk has been helpful the few times I’ve had to use it. If you already have an email campaign with another company, you can export your contact list and easily transfer the whole list to MailChimp.
So I really wanted to create a newsletter that looks very much like my website. I wanted constancy so I used MailChimp’s “code your own” system and literally created the entire newsletter from scratch in HTML. I did a few tests and everything looked fine. It looked good in my Outlook and Gmail, so I sent it out.
I noticed the few images that did appear were images that were actually linked and stored on my website and not linked to MailChimp’s gallery. So I made sure all the images were coming from my website and sent out a new test to the Comcast account. No difference. I’m extremely bummed. I really want my newsletter to be like my website for consistency.
