Email Newsletter Strategies For Profit

By V. Subhash

An organically grown mailing list is an invaluable resource for your business. It is your own network. You need to nurture it like a baby. In this book, you get practical tips on creating user-friendly newsletters. You also learn how to ensure that your emails reach their intended audience and transform into increased sales and profits.

Specifically, you learn to ensure email deliverability, improve click-through rates, implement industry-standard best practices, pick your battles, and choose the best resources. Also learn valuable tips and tricks to defeat spammers and troubleshoot problems. This book explains complex issues in plain English but does not shy away from providing practical and technical solutions that you can suggest to your Web and marketing teams.

• Language: English
• Publisher: V. Subhash
• Release date: Aug 20, 2020
• ISBN: 9781393238409

V. Subhash

V. Subhash is an invisible Indian writer, programmer and cartoonist. In 2020, he published one of the biggest jokebooks of all time — 2020 FRESH CLEAN JOKES FOR EVERYONE. He followed this jokebook with a tech book on the free multimedia-editing utility FFmpeg and a 400-page volume of 149 political cartoons. Although he had published a few ebooks (using off-the-shelf software) as early as 2003, Subhash did not publish books in the traditional sense until 2020. For over two decades, Subhash had used his website www.VSubhash.com as the main outlet for his writing. During this time, he had accumulated a lot of published and unpublished material. This content and the advanced book-production process that he had developed helped him publish 21 books in his first year. In February 2023, Apress/SpringerNature published his rewritten and updated FFmpeg book as QUICK START GUIDE TO FFMPEG. Thus, by early 2023, Subhash had published 30 books! In 2022, Subhash ran out of non-fiction material and tried his hand at fiction. The result was UNLIKELY STORIES, a collection of horror and comedy short stories. After adding new stories to this fiction title (for its second edition), Subhash plans to pause his writing and move on to other things. Subhash pursues numerous hobbies and interests, several of which have become the subject of his books such as COOL ELECTRONIC PROJECTS, HOW TO INSTALL SOLAR and HOW TO INVEST IN STOCKS. He was inspired to write his jokebook after years of listening to vintage American radio shows such as ‘Fibber & Molly’ and ‘Duffy's Tavern’. For more, check out: www.VSubhash.in

Book preview

Introduction

Hundreds of millions of people begin their workday by checking email. Many of them devote hours together to it.

Email has such a huge marketshare and mindshare that several audacious attempts have been made to make it proprietary under the wings of a private corporation. Even the grand old lady of New York could not resist the temptations of greedy venture capital funds chasing this chimera.

Five years earlier, Facebook offered to bury email with their brand of social inbox

. In 2004, perennial latecomer to the Internet party Bill Gates promised to kill spam (and probably email) with his idea of stamps for electronic messages

. Thankfully, it did not pan out!

A product of the early days of the Internet (preceding the World Wide Web (WWW)), email has outlived many premature obituaries and shown remarkable resilience. Thanks to its open architecture, anybody can own an email address and use it to contact anyone. It is a great equalizer and democratic at its best. It is also intensely personal and is not menaced by the whims and fancies of some moody algorithm of a social media outfit.

However, Big Tech is not yet out of the picture. In fact, they are more so. Gmail is offering free email and even hosting mail for businesses. This gives it an opportunity to say what kind of email it will display in the inbox. Outlook, the email client bundled in the Microsoft Office productivity suite, provides only limited to support for HTML email and seriously limits what kind of HTML tags you can use in your HTML email.

Email is also subject to junk mail filters and block lists maintained by open-source projects such as SpamAssassin and industry organizations such as SpamHaus. They do not just block spammers but also entire ISPs and even countries.

Email servers also have to be identified as legitimate by the domains that they send email for. The days when just about anyone could send email in the name of Bill Gates are long over.

It is not that automated systems are the only ones filtering email. Human email recipients actively block those sending out unwanted email. Information overload is a serious problem that people are just not ready for emails that take longer than necessary. Too many emails? Blocked! Too much useless information? Delete from server! Lots of images? Unsubscribed! It can happen to anyone.

If you send out a lot of email, you need to be very careful. Customers will blame you even when their junk filters catch your email. Even an innocuous word like FREE appearing in the subject line will trigger junk mail filters.

There are several such things to check. In the following chapters, you learn more of it. Specifically, you will learn how to overcome these filters, reach the recipient's inbox and more importantly not get blocked by the recipient.

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References

The Register, UK

(January 2004)

We'll kill spam in two years – Gates

New York Times

(November 2010)

Facebook messaging tool dares to make email passe

This article is now titled less gushingly as

Facebook Offers New Messaging Tool

User-Friendly Newsletters

Many customer-focussed companies send out a lot of email newsletters. Quite a lot of them are never read. Some subscribers unsubscribe almost immediately after receiving the first email. Some others would not even try the unsubscribe link. They will simply mark the email as junk.

What prompts this lost love? Usually, quality of content is often blamed. Usability could also be a reason. In this section, I will focus solely on email usability.

Email Usability Mistakes

If you start thinking like a subscriber, you will easily know what the problems are.

Remote-Loading Images

Most professionally made HTML newsletters contain remotely hosted images. Because the addresses of these images have tracking information connected to the email address, the image hosting server can determine whether the email has been read when it receives a request for that image. A request is sent when the recipient reads the mail and enables the loading of the images from the remote image host. To protect the recipient's privacy, most email clients (including web mail) block email images by default and show boxy placeholders. The decision whether to enable the display of these images is left to the recipient.

Some smart webmail providers download and cache these images to their servers and display them without triggering their links when a recipient actually