Best Practices for email newsletters

These days seems like everyone is developing eNewsletters to support their customer retention and growth efforts. Makes a lot of sense, as long as you keep your customer at the top of mind when creating AND follow these best practices:

• Design should draw the recipient in
• Preview pane should include a logo or company name in a prominent position, a link to view the email online, and engage the recipient even if the images are blocked
• Include a table of contents specific to the issue with links, either to each item in the email newsletter or to the full text on a web site
• Use images as long as they add to the recipient's experience, not detract from it
• Content should be easy to scan, using bullet points and white space
• Personalize the content based on what you know about the recipient (info from sign up forms, web traffic, past purchases, etc.), whenever possible – technologies make this relatively easy.
  

And most importantly, make sure your content is relevant, benefit-driven content for your customer. First impressions mean everything here, if your customer doesn’t like it the first time, they’ll opt-out and we definitely don’t want that to happen!