Managing your newsletter distribution08 June 2005
If you regularly send an email newsletter or e-zine out to your customers, you can find that it's difficult to work out whether your emails are getting past spam filters or are being read by the recipients. Specialised email management systems can help to ensure that your customers receive your communications, and can also be particularly useful if you are struggling with a large and unwieldy list of subscribers.
Popular email distribution services include CheetahMail, Constant Contact, Mailloop 6.0 and Opti-mail.
What should you look for?
- Cost. You should check whether you are paying per email sent (prices start at around 0.5p per email), or per subscriber. Find out whether there is a discount for pre-paying up front, or for buying in bulk (for example per 5,000 emails), and whether there are any set-up costs.
- An automated subscribe and unsubscribe service. This will save you manually dealing with hundreds of sign-up emails, or emails that bounce due to an old or incorrect address.
- Plain text or html. Many services offer the ability to automatically send html or text versions of your newsletter, depending on your customer's preference.
- Templates or wizards. If you find creating emails in html difficult, look for a service which provides easy-to-use templates or wizards for you to use to create an eye-catching newsletter.
- Statistics and reports. You need to be able to track your subscribers, and find out who is subscribing, unsubscribing, and which emails bounce. The service should also track the number of email messages which have been opened or forwarded on to another person, and any click-through statistics from hyperlinks in your newsletter.
Getting past spam filters
Even if you use an email management system, getting your newsletter through the spam filters that many ISPs apply can prove difficult. The following tips will increase your chances of getting your newsletter to your subscriber:
- Don't overuse capital letters. Spam filters often view a sentence of all uppercase letters as 'shouting', and may block a newsletter that appears to have an excess of this. If your headings and subheadings are usually all capitalised, change to a mixture of cases
- Be aware of words that can trigger the filters. Obviously swearing will automatically set alarm bells ringing, but even innocuous sounding words such as 'free', 'sale', 'win' and even 'click' can be a problem. Check your text at the E-zine Check which scores it in terms of how many 'penalty' points it would potentially attract, and offers a free list of suggestions
- Set up a free email account with Hotmail or Yahoo and send your newsletter to this address to test whether it survives the filters
- Make the latest edition of your newsletter available online. You can then send a short teaser email to subscribers with a link to your web site
Using a firm which subscribes to the certified "Bonded Sender" scheme, will help you raise the chances of getting past the spam filters, and successfully getting your newsletter to your readers.
