Posted in Email Marketing Tips	April 10, 2008

29 Insider Secrets for Creating Effective and Profitable Email Newsletters

Your email strategy is one of those strategies that you think about, organize and plan about once a year. It’s the process of configuring your editorial to promotional strategy and ratio and maximizing reader engagement.

In other words, getting users back to your site. If you’re product driven, most likely you are deciding how you will get users to buy a product while if you’re ad-driven you want to drive them back to the site to view pages and articles there.

Don mentioned seven things that you want your email newsletter to do:

• Get Delivered
• Get Opened
• Get Read
• Intrigue and Engage
• Build a Relationship
• Get Recommended
• Generate Revenue
  

According to Don, the most effective email newsletters are also semi-promotional. Effective publishers have dedicated templates for each email newsletter they send. For example, if you are a medical publisher sending an email newsletter about “heart health”, your featured product better be a report about “how to avoid a heart attack”, or the like. According to Don, “68% of product sales start with an email source code”.

Learn more about maximizing your online strategy in Generating Website Revenue 2007.

The Mequoda email funnel shows that out of all of your emails, 100% are sent, 97% are delivered, 34% are opened, 6% are clicked on, and only 1% complete a transaction. However, if 1% is looking grim, take a look at the size of your email list. 1% can be a pretty decent conversion rate.

Don also showed a personal Mequoda example that showed how adding “Mequoda Daily:” to the beginning of every email subject line brought their delivery rates way up. We went from 4-19% of emails that went “missing” according to Delivery Monitor, to 0%.

Another attendee shared with the audience that in his experience, he had a lot of success with putting as little in the subject line as possible and instead including an issue number. This was because he felt that you can “give too much away” by telling people what is inside; if a user decides preemptively that they don’t need what you’re sending, they’ll just delete it.

Valuable tools that Don and attendees mentioned during this session:

DeliveryMonitor.com – Monitors your email delivery rates
MailingCheck.com – Monitors your outgoing emails for spam
SpamCheck - Monitors your outgoing emails for spam
WhatCounts – Mequoda’s new email client
ConstantContact – a recommended email client
ExactTarget – a recommended email client
EmailLabs – a recommended email client
YesMail – a recommended email client
CheetahMail – a recommended email client

Mequoda Summit Coverage

• Session 1 - Making Money Online
• Session 2 - Using New Media to Expand Your Brand
• Session 3 - Generating Website Revenue
• Session 4 - SEO Research and Analytics
• Session 5 - SEO Copywriting and Campaign Management
• Session 6 - Designing Effective Media Websites
• Session 7: Email Newsletter Secrets
• Session 8: Creating a Management Dashboard