How to make a mailing list by email, if you have never engaged in email marketing? Get ready: there will be many mistakes. We will help to prevent the most offensive, and the rest will come with practice.
What is an email newsletter?
Let’s start with the simple. What is mailing and how is it different from spam?
- Mailing is emails that a company sends to users in large quantities.
Users receive the newsletter voluntarily, they give their consent in paper questionnaires or in the subscription forms on the site.
- Spam is mailing without the user’s permission.
Spam and a letter that fell into the Spam folder are not the same things. The legal mailing may fall into the Spam basket because of complaints from subscribers. For example, if they did not find the button “unsubscribe” in the letter.
Mailing platform
Mass mailing is usually carried out not from personal mail. Firstly, it is illegal – mail services will quickly fix activity that is not typical for your mailbox and block your domain. Secondly, it is difficult: every time you have to manually type in the addresses of the recipients in the “to” column. With a base of hundreds of subscribers, this is hell.
Letters are sent from the mailing platforms.
Platforms such as the Campaign Monitor show statistics of the deliverability, the discoverability of messages, and clicking on links inside the letter. Based on this data, you can quickly understand whether users want to read news from you, whether they are interested in your newsletters.
The mailing platform is a paid tool, but some services offer free test access to the platform for beginners or as Campaign Monitor where the cost for the basic account only $9. This is convenient: it allows you to understand the capabilities of the platform before you will sign up for the full package. Campaign Monitor has materials from the knowledge base, a blog, training videos, and newsletters.
Address Base
The base of electronic addresses of users that you have collected in various ways. It is necessary to work with it carefully, after all, there is a specific person behind each email address, and you will communicate with him on behalf of the company.
Domain Reputation
The domain is the name of the site of the company on whose behalf you are sending the newsletter. Domain Reputation – conditional assessment of your domain on the legality and quality of mass mailing.
Email providers – Yahoo, Google, cloud, form domain reputation. Each mail service has its own list of parameters by which the domain is evaluated. General criteria for a good reputation – a database of addresses without spam traps, high rates of discovery and clickability, complaints about spam.
Domain reputation is something that you need to follow constantly. If it falls, email providers will block the domain and prohibit sending letters to subscribers. To restore the reputation, you have to spend weeks, months or years. Therefore, it’s better to sort out the technical details of the newsletter before you send your first letter.
Content
No matter how you understand the scary words “validation” and “authentication” and were not happy about the first steps in email marketing, this is not what the subscriber needs from you. Users are looking for useful and beautifully packaged information in the box.
Design
There are several ways to design a newsletter. The easiest is to choose a ready-made letter template on the platform from which you are sending the newsletter.
In the Campaign Monitor template library, it is easy to move and add elements: in the footer, swap links to social networks or insert the required number of pictures in the main part. You can change the set colors – for example, choose corporate. For the first mailing experience, a ready-made template is ideal, but you can create a template yourself, from scratch. Whatever way you do the design of the letter, make sure that it is adaptive. Adaptive design is one that is correctly displayed on all devices: computers, tablets, and smartphones.
