E-Newsletters Need Maintenance
Posted on 06. Aug, 2010 by David Kluskiewicz in interactive
E-newsletters are a powerful tool in your marketing mix, but they will need maintenance regularly in order to continue to perform well. Every time you invest the time to broadcast a message to your clients, customers and prospects, through an email, you need that message to reflect the quality of your business. A broken link or a misaligned graphic can send a signal to a recipient that you are sloppy in your delivery. It’s a psychological distraction. It’s similar to the effect of receiving a resume with a typo.
Do you want to alienate a client, just because he uses AOL Mail?
Email clients (the programs you use to access your email, such as Outlook, Gmail, Lotus Mail, etc.) change unpredictably. Sometimes they are undergo updates. Other times, people simply use a different email client. You have no control over these changes. However, you can make an effort to accommodate most of them.
But, everybody uses Outlook, right?
I can’t tell you the number of times clients say, “Our customers only use Microsoft Outlook.” This is patently false and it will sabotage your email marketing campaign. Smart customers don’t just follow the IT people blindly. They use the tools that help them maximize their productivity. Look at the graph on the right. It’s an email to “business users”. Outlook still maintains a strong lead, but it is by no means exclusive.
How do we keep an e-newsletter consistent?
Periodically, have a professional web developer test it and tune it up. They’ll make sure it follows the current web standards. More importantly, their work will keep your brand and image consistent in the inboxes of your customers and prospects.