5 tips about how to market products with email newsletters

Email marketing, for example by using newsletters, is a very fast and cost-effective way to market your products and services. You can achieve some really impressive results with emails; you just have to make sure to do it right. Below we offer you five quick tips that can easily help you to create a successful email marketing strategy and achieve the best possible results:

1. Plan your email marketing strategy
To make your email marketing successful, you need a well prepared strategy. Get the right message to your customer at the right time. How to do it?  Plan your email dispatches carefully in advance. Where do you start? The easiest way is to set and divide your email marketing strategy into three parts:

Inform with email
The first step is to inform your customers about the products and services you offer. Try to do it in an objective way, simply explain what your products do and who can benefit from them. That is not always obvious, especially for new customers, so you have to “teach” your customers about your products. Here, an email newsletter with information and tips about your products can be an excellent way to do this. You can add links to your website for more detailed information or a PDF document with a product presentation.

Remember, the first step is about informing, not selling. Provide your contact details so customers can get in touch with you if they need more information or want to order something.

Market with email
The next step is to promote and market your products with the help of email. It requires a long-term perspective.The goal is to highlight the benefits that your products offer and to strengthen your brand and company name towards your customers.

A newsletter sent by email is an excellent method to do so. You can complete your newsletter with a targeted email promotion, primarily aimed at those who have shown some interest in your products before. You will achieve the best results if you adjust your targeted email promotion for every customer group. Your goal is to make your readers curious to seek more information or to contact you, even though they won’t be buying directly. Make them click on to your website where you can highlight the benefits of your products even more.

Sell with email
The ultimate goal is selling. So how do you optimize your sales letters and get your customers to buy directly? Well, it won’t work without the first two steps. Your customers need to have a good knowledge of your products and the benefits they offer. If you have done your homework with the first two steps, now it’s time to strike. Send a sales email and aim for a direct purchase decision. Don’t forget to make it as easy as possible for your customers to order.

2. Optimize your email marketing costs
Costs are of great importance for any business and email marketing in no exception. You need to face the question how much money and time you can invest in your email marketing. Here comes the big advantage of email marketing compared to other marketing forms; its low costs. Email dispatch is free and newsletter creation cost is totally up to you. With a good email marketing tool you can achieve impressive results with no need for spending hours on it.

Well designed newsletter templates give you the possibility to quickly create your own professionally looking newsletters at low costs. Moreover, you can easily customize them after your needs. A newsletter template created by a web consultant exactly the way you want it can also be a good investment. A well made newsletter template is easy to reuse by replacing images and text every time you need a new newsletter.

3. Make sure to have correct email addresses
E-mail addresses change frequently so you need to update your mailing list regularly. A good tip that makes a difference is to use personal email addresses such as “john.smith@samlogic.com” instead of “info@samlogic.com“. It increases the chance of getting your email to the right person. Last but not least, avoid email duplicates. Getting the same email several times can be very annoying. Use an email program that finds and eliminates the duplicates for you.

4. Best timing for your email dispatch
Time your email dispatch so that your customers can read your newsletter undisturbed. The best timing for receiving emails for B2B (business to business) clients is within office hours. E-mails sent on weekends and at night most likely disappear in the email overload popping up every morning in your customers’ inbox. Monday mornings are extra overwhelming so try to avoid them.

Mondays in general are not the best days for sending out newsletters due to heavy work load. Fridays’ dispatches on the other hand should be done in the morning as Friday is often a shorter workday.

Plan international dispatches to foreign customers in other time zones so that they are received during office hours. An email program/service with an automatic build-in email dispatch at a predefined time can help you with this (i.e. you can choose an exact time for your email dispatch or set a specific time zone for every contact).

5. Marketing emails and newsletters frequency
Sending out marketing emails too often puts you at risk of making your customers tired of it and signing out from it, or even blocking you as a sender. To avoid this, don’t send your emails to the same customer too often. On the other hand, too sporadic email dispatches may be a cause of missing an important business opportunity. The key is to find a balance for your email dispatches. A regular monthly newsletter completed with emails with more detailed information about new products plus an annual email promotion can be an appropriate email marketing strategy.

It is difficult to set a general email marketing periodicity since the recommendation varies from branch to branch. For branches with quick development and constant changes it is important to receive fresh news frequently. Less frequent email dispatches are more appropriate for branches with slower innovation pace. To achieve the best results, combine email marketing with other forms of marketing channels such as Facebook and Twitter.

See also these articles
> How to create a newsletter that increase sales
> Free Newsletter Templates for Email Marketing
> Sending Newsletters via E-mail (21 Advantages)

15 tips that reduce the spam score for your newsletter

Stop spam!Making a legitimate newsletter pass trough all spam filters can be tricky today. The spam filters are very sensitive and sometimes they make mistakes. The result of this is that also newsletters that receivers subscribe on and really want to read can be stopped by a spam filter; either by a spam filter on a server or by a spam filter on a client computer.

15 tips
We have published an article on our website that contains 15 useful tips that help to minimize the risk that legitimate newsletters are stopped by spam filters. If you use our email tool SamLogic MultiMailer, or another email software or service to send newsletter to your customers, we recommend you to read the following article:

> How to reduce spam score for your newsletters

Which image format is best for email newsletters?

JPEG / PNG / GIFToday there are many different image file formats to choose from for your pictures; for example BMP, TIFF, EPS, JPEG, PNG and GIF. Image formats are often designed to be used in specific contexts, and applying a particular image format in a wrong context usually leads to a poor result. That is why it is important to choose an image format that is suitable for the particular environment and context that your picture intends to be used in. But which image format is best for email newsletters?

New article
We have published a new article on our website that gives you an answer to this question. Among others, we explain the pros and cons of different image formats. You can easily access the article by clicking at the link below. We highly recommend you to read the article as it contains a lot of useful information, especially relevant for those sending out email newsletters with our email marketing software MultiMailer or any other email newsletter tools:

> Which image format is best for email newsletters: JPEG, GIF or PNG?

Half of all newsletters is opened on a mobile device

More and more people open their newsletters on mobile devices. According to a study done by Experian Marketing Services is half of all emails opened solely on a mobile device, compared to 23 percent for both email clients and web clients.

Important to use the right email software
This means that it is increasingly important to use a newsletter software that is designed for creating email newsletters that display properly on mobile devices. The MultiMailer 2013 email marketing software is designed for just that.

There is couple of things good to know about and consider when creating a newsletter that is to be read on mobile devices. In this article on our website we have compiled useful tips for you.

More information
> Experian Marketing Services study “Quarterly Email Benchmark Study Q2 2013” (PDF)
> Mobile Email – How to create a newsletter for a mobile phone and smart phone
> Responsive Email Design: One newsletter for a smartphone, tablet, laptop & desktop computer
> Android – The Rise to Success

Android – The Rise to Success

In this article on our website we inform about how to create an email newsletter that can be read on a smartphone. We also discuss different smartphone models and different operating systems for smartphones.

Android
One common operating system (OS) for smartphones is Android from Google. Android is a Linux-based operating system designed for touchscreen mobile devices such as smartphones and tablet computers. Android is a very popular operating system and is used for example in Samsung Galaxy S2 and Samsung Galaxy S3, which are two smartphone models that have been sold in very large numbers.

75% of All Sold Smartphones
About 75% of all smartphones that were sold the third quarter of 2012 used Android as operating system. 1.3 million devices were activated every day in the same period. Today Android is the world’s most used smartphone OS / platform.

Infographic: Android – The Rise to Success
The infographic below (from MBA Online) gives interesting facts about Android’s rise to success:

Android - The Rise to Success

Responsive Email Design: One newsletter for a smartphone, tablet, laptop and desktop computer


In this blog post we wrote some words about how to design a newsletter so it can be read on a smartphone, tablet, laptop and desktop computer without modifications. The email will adapt itself automatically to the width of the display / screen. This is called responsive email design and in the following blog post, written by Christian Vasile, you will find more details about how to utilize responsive email design to design a newsletter so it can be read on devices with very different display widths:

> Responsive Email Newsletter Design: Increase Mobile Readership

We also recommend you to read this article on our web site; it contains information about how to design an email newsletter for a mobile phone and smartphone:

> How to Create a Newsletter for a Mobile Phone & Smartphone

Design for the email newsletter subscriber

Designers and marketers often make the mistake of concentrating on developing creative copy and layout for their email newsletters, not accounting for the entire experience of opening and reading an email. In an informative blog post Litmus (an email testing and email marketing analytics company) describes 8 crucial steps that a subscriber goes through when he/she interacts with an email newsletter. Litmus also provides tips on how to make those interactions successful.

You can read the full blog post, and see the full version of the picture above, here:

> 8 Email Design Factors That Influence Action

If you are a user of SamLogic MultiMailer we recommend you too read the blog post.

Responsive Email Newsletter Design

Responsive Web Design (RWD) is something that have attracted much attention over the past year, and we at SamLogic Software sometimes get this question from our MultiMailer users: can I implement responsive design also on an email newsletter? The answer is: yes, it is possible.

Responsive Web Design
Responsive Web Design is normally used on web pages that need to be adapted to very different displays widths; for example the display width of a mobile phone / smartphone, the display width of a tablet (like iPad) and the display width of computer’s screen (that can be very wide today). By implementing responsive web design on the web page, the same version of the web page can be used on all displays. There is no need to create different web pages for different display widths.

Responsive Email Newsletter Design
Same techniques that are used on web pages can also be used with email newsletters. If you are familiar with HTML and CSS then maybe you are familiar with the media query rule (@media). By using this rule you can create a responsive web page and HTML newsletter. More information about responsive email newsletter design and the media query rule is available in this article on our web site:

> Adapt a Newsletter for Different Display Width (Mobile Phone etc.)

If you are not familiar with the media query rule, you will find links to pages with more information in the article.

Free Email Newsletter Templates

There are many web sites on the Internet that offer free email newsletter templates. The templates can be used for email marketing / email campaigns, or for other purposes. A big advantage of using a ready-made newsletter template is that you will save much time. You don’t need to create a complete newsletter from scratch; you only need to make the changes that are unique for your company, for example adding your company’s logotype. Or maybe adjusting some colors or font sizes in the template.

HTML templates
The templates are mostly created with HTML, but plain text templates are also available. HTML templates are preferable for newsletters because they allow you to include images, colors, different fonts etc. If design is important for you, you should choose an HTML template for your newsletter.

Web sites with free email newsletter templates
If you need to find a well-designed email template you should read this article on our web site:

> Free Newsletter Templates for Email Marketing

There we list some good web sites that offer free email newsletter templates. The web sites also sell newsletter templates, but the price is generally quite low. Some of the web sites also offer to design a tailor-made template just for you or your company.

Compatible with our email software MultiMailer
The newsletter templates on the web sites that we list in the article are compatible with our email software MultiMailer. So if you are a MultiMailer user, you can download the email templates and use them directly in the program.

Compatible with Microsoft Outlook etc.
The newsletter templates are also compatible, and can be edited, with email clients like Microsoft Outlook and Lotus Notes. Some of the templates can also be edited with Adobe Photoshop. And if you are a web designer and have installed software like Adobe Dreamweaver or Microsoft Expression Web, they can be edited also with these programs. Technically, an HTML newsletter template is just an HTML web page.

How to design a newsletter for a smartphone

Many people use a smartphone (an advanced mobile phone) to read their email newsletters nowadays. A smartphone of the latest model is so advanced that it can be regarded as small computer. This means that they can run quite advanced software, for example a feature-rich e-mail client, with almost same capabilities as an e-mail client that is run in a large desktop computer.

One important difference
But there is one difference that is important to consider when designing a newsletter that may be read in a smartphone; it’s the fact that the display in a smartphone is much narrower than a computer’s screen.

Do I need to design my newsletter for a smartphone?
As a first step, you should test your newsletter in a smartphone. How does it look like? Some email newsletters may already look good in a smartphone, but some does not. If you are not satisfied with how your newsletter looks in a smartphone, you should consider doing one of these four things:

  • Add a link in the top of your newsletter that opens a smartphone-friendly edition of your newsletter.
  • Ask the recipient how he/she prefers to read the newsletter (in a smartphone or in a desktop computer) and use two email delivery lists.
  • Design a newsletter that look good in both a smartphone and desktop computer.
  • Add a script in the HTML that adapts the newsletter to a smartphone or desktop computer.

Read our article
In this article on our website we will describe the four options above in more detail:
> How to Create a Newsletter for a Mobile Phone & Smartphone