Email newsletters are one of the methods of letting your trusted customers know that there are updates that you would like to share with them. This method originated with the online news service agencies that sent news updates as nearly live feeds to recipients. Business also learned to cash in on this method and used it for everything from company newsletters to a form of email marketing as well. However, instead of putting out all kinds of news, the corporate world sent generic articles or matters of fact in emails, which supported the sale of their products.



The most important part of a newsletter is the content itself. This coupled with the formatting and attractiveness of an email would seem to be the only considerations; however, there is the small issue about actually sending the mail itself. One of the biggest problems that face the senders of newsletters is the temptation to enroll with service providers that turn out to send mails using open relays or is using spammer identities. The first part of ensuring proper delivery is to either use your own servers or use a mass mailing service provider that has a certain amount of credibility in the industry.

The second part of improving delivery of your email newsletters is to consider the effects of spam filters on the mails that you send. A spam filter is one of the few show stoppers between you and the recipient. If you are a genuine sender that has acquired email addresses after the customer has opted-in, then there is really little that you need to worry about. However, if you are a first time mailer, then you can safely assume that there is a pretty good chance of being caught in the web of spam filters. To avoid this situation, get email addresses legitimately from users by asking if they want to receive updates in the first place. After this, send a confirmation email and ensure that you inform the customer that he or she needs to check the junk email folder for the confirmation mail and unmark it as spam.

The third part of ensuring delivery lies in the final step when your mail actually does lie in the inbox of the recipient. You might think that it is all downhill from here but this is where a metric that you should monitor comes into the picture. The email open rates indicate how many of your emails have been opened. The one thing that can spoil a good bunch of open rate figures is the subject line. What you need to do is to make subject lines that are topical and sound more like newsreel information rather than offers of spiel.

Your subject lines should also clearly state that your mail is a newsletter by adding the prefix specifically stating so. You might face some problems when you have many news items in the same newsletter, in which case you just need to mention that this is the current issue of the newsletter along with the date.