Do you send email newsletters to your customers and prospects? Smashing Magazine has some great tips for designing and sending your email newsletters.
- Respect your reader. Don’t waste their time or attention.
- Ask nicely first.
- Focus on relevance.
- Design with a goal in mind, so that you’ll know if it worked.
- Make unsubscribing easy.
- Code like it’s 1999 (literally) and use inline CSS.
- Always include a plain text version.
- Don’t assume that images will be viewed.
- Follow the law.
- Test everything before sending, because you can’t take it back.
In their article they expand on each of the points and provide a bunch of very good looking examples of newsletters to inspire you.
If you don’t have a newsletter and even don’t know where to even begin, be sure to check out Aweber. I use them for my newsletter and they make email marketing easy.