Decide how many lists you want. For example, you might want a “News- letters” list, but also a separate “Press & Media Relations” list. Some people set up “Weekly Specials” lists and “Internal Employee Newsletter” lists. The basic idea is that you don’t want to send your weekly specials to someone on your list who might have just been expecting an occasional newsletter.
Decide on your content and frequency. Will you send email newsletters every single month? Do you truly have the time to do that? What will the newsletter be about? Why would anybody want to subscribe to it? What will recipients gain from it?
Get permission. Ask the customers in your database for permission to send them email newsletters, offers and promotions.
Get your privacy policy in order. In particular, issues like “tracking personally identifiable information” or “marketing to children under 13.”
Set up email addresses that you can use as the “Reply-to:” for your campaigns. You might use sales@ or email@. Whatever. Just be sure it works, and be sure a human checks that account. If you use jenny@yourcompany.com, what happens when Jenny leaves the company? You’ll need to change names to the new guy, but spam filters will have already been trained to receive emails from Jenny.
Set up an abuse@ email account. No matter how clean you keep your list, you’ll always get complaints. It’s inevitable.
Set up test email accounts with Yahoo, Gmail, Hotmail and AOL.
Design your HTML email template. If you’re sending different kinds of communications (sales promotions vs. monthly newsletters vs. how-to’s and tips), you might set up multiple templates for each occasion.
Insert real content into your test campaigns. Don’t just use “lorem ipsum dummy text” when you test campaigns. It’s not accurate, plus spam filters often throw away emails with garbled, nonsensical words in them. Build your plain-text alternative email. Plain-text email has its own pecu- liarities, so you’ll want to get a template for it refined from the beginning. Don’t let plain-text be an afterthought.
Test your templates. And we mean really test them like you’ve never tested before. Send them to friends, family and colleagues. Try the templates in as many different email applications you can. Open your own emails, and click them like crazy. Now go check your reports. Make sure all the tracking works like it should. Click reply and see if you get replies to your account. You want to uncover any embarrassing mistakes before sending to your real customers.
Set up a test list. If you’re like most people, you probably have about three or four email addresses. Why not set up a test list, and send your full campaign to that list?
Make sure you’re subscribed to your own list. Seems obvious, but people often forget. Prepare your website and landing pages for delivery. Before you send, get everything in order. Did you create a copy/archive of the email for your website? Make sure that’s all in place.
Deliver the campaign. Finally!
View stats after sending. You can virtually watch the opens and clicks as they happen. It’s always shock- ing to see how many people open and click in the first few minutes after you send. Then it trails off, but you’ll still get opens and clicks weeks after.
Review performance. After a few days, go back and analyze your reports. How many opens? How many clicks? Compare it to your web traffic logs, and most importantly, to sales. Did the email generate leads or sales? What was the ROI on that campaign?
Plan the next campaign. Use your campaign reports to understand what people clicked and what they didn’t. That should serve as the founda- tion for your next campaign. Maybe you’ll split up your list and segment next time around, or test different subject lines or delivery schedules. Get scientific.