Impressions are important. Your business is important. Newsletters are a great way to promote your services.
They are often the first concrete contact point between you and a potential customer and could very well be the last one. So what impression is your newsletter giving to your all important client base?
Picture this: you want to take a hot date to an expensive restaurant. You arrive late, you stall your car at the venue and your credit card is bounced after offering to pay for the meal. You drop your date off, turn down a dead end and have to do a twelve point turn to go home. Do you think you’ll get another date?
Technique is vital to your email marketing performance, but once you have that down, you need the best tools at your disposal for maximum effect. If this talking about restaurants made you hungry for restuarant email marketing strategy, here is a guide on email marketing for restaurants. Back to our main story: Here are some helpful signs to look out for to find the best email newsletter tool for your business.
Lots of email templates = lots of appeal
Choice is everything. It separates the winners from the losers and makes individuals stand out from the crowd. So your newsletter should not settle for less, it should strive for more.
Multiple choices of high quality, easily customizable design templates, are a must for any newsletter tool that is effective for its purpose. More templates and customisation mean your newsletter will not only stand out amongst the swarm of mail in your client’s inbox, but also in a potential customer’s mind. If your newsletter tool limits your creativity, it’s also limiting your client base.
Make sure the newsletter templates are mobile friendly; meaning that no matter on how small a screen your newsletters are read, they still look smashing!
Globally, 47% of email is now opened on a mobile device – more than traditional desktop email clients!
Newsletter reports yield results
Results are like rabbits – the more you have access to, the more you will get. Knowing your email marketing results via email newsletter reporting and making the necessary changes will get you more results.
It’s all well and good if you’re the best writer since Hemingway, but if you’re sending your well crafted newsletter to dead email accounts no one is going to care!
You need to know the details and results from what you send out or you’re flying blind. A good newsletter tool will have detailed reports on how your newsletter is performing out in the real world and will offer A / B split tests, an Inbox preview option and mailing list clean tools.
What are people responding to and clicking on? How many bounces are you getting and where? Which newsletters are getting the better results? All these questions can be resolved through a quality newsletter tool that has access to reports that allow for extremely detailed, accurate and up to date results.
Social Media and your Email Newsletter Tool
While email marketing is far from dying out, it does not hurt to take advantage of social networks. Social Networks can be an online marketer’s gold mine. Besides, if you are not allowing your clients the opportunity to tell all their friends how awesome your services are, you are doing your clients and yourself a disservice!
The best newsletter tools see the emergence of social networks as opportunities rather than threats and have thus allowed the integration of email marketing and social media with a click.
This allows you to share your newsletter with your Facebook fans, Twitter followers or Google+ devotees. It also allows your customers to share your letter easily to their friends creating a snowball effect where everybody wins!
Interface – Looking and Feeling Good
You can have the fastest and most powerful car in the world but if you don’t know how to start it, you’re not going anywhere. Likewise, if you don’t know how to use your newsletter tool, your newsletter isn’t going anywhere!
While often taken for granted, the interface and user friendliness of a newsletter tool can make or break productivity and even the newsletter itself when the author has no idea how to finish it! Especially if you aren’t spending all your days inside the email newsletter tool, it will be hard to learn to work with a complex one.
A quality newsletter tool doesn’t not only look great but also feels great. The tool should feel intuitive, practical and logical. Basic functions such as adding a graphic, title or border should take a couple of seconds, not require you to have a degree in computer programming!
You Newsletter Tool needs some Mobile Magic
The world is going mobile – and so should you. Your customers are busy people. People usually only get the luxury of sitting down to check their email on their laptop after a long day of hard work. Seeing your newsletter at this time could make your clients ignore it – and no-one likes being ignored.
Dont be left behind. If your clients are mobile; reach them through their mobile phones. A good newsletter tool gives you the power to easily go mobile and reach your clients with impact, straight in their pocket.There are some specifics to look for in a mobile email ESP.
Whether it is via text message (SMS) or a fully optimised newsletter for mobile clients like smartphones and tablets, your newsletter tool should be able to optimise your message for whatever medium you choose.
What to look for in a quality email newsletter Tool
To round up, what should you be looking for in a quality email newsletter Tool?
- A variety of fully customisable templates that grab a reader’s attention.
- Detailed reports with A / B split tests, an Inbox preview option and mailing list clean tools.
- Integration of email marketing and social media options.
- Easy to use and intuitive interface.
- Mobile optimisation.
Make sure you have access to the best tools available to get the most out of your newsletters, clients and ultimately your business. Stay tuned for more signs of a quality newsletter tool!