Everybody gets some sort of newsletter in their inbox, whether it be from another blogger within a specific niche, restaurants, churches, sporting events, concert updates, etc. Why? Because they work. 

The main purpose of a newsletter is to inform, promote, and make the user engage by completing a sale with a call to action or driving more traffic to the company's website. Most businesses should be utilizing an e-blast of some sort to promote and sell their products or services, depending on your industry.

So upon completing my first e-blast for RioRancho.biz and SantaFe.biz, an advertising website for listing local businesses in New Mexico, I'm going to share some tips, tricks, and best practices to use in an e-blast to help your marketing strategy.

Inspiration

First, you should research other newsletters and get some inspiration. There is a plethora of information out there. Just Google e-mail newsletter inspiration and see what comes up. Among my favorites are:

• dzineblog – 25 Impressive E-mail Newsletter Designs
• designtutorials4u – 30 Excellent Graphic E-mail Newsletters

Guidelines To Follow

Now that you have some inspiration and are ready to start designing e-blasts for your clients, let's take a step further into some best practices.

• Know XHTML & CSS. This is the best way to build anything for the web for many, many reasons.
• Only use tables. You SHOULD NOT be using DIVs, psuedo-classes, or any advanced coding while developing your e-blast. E-mail services cannot comprehend a lot of code.
• Like websites, you should keep a minimum width, as the box that most e-mails are displayed in are less than 700 pixels wide. For my first e-blast, I used a width of 600 pixels. You can make the e-blast as large as you want, but for users with small monitors and large resolutions, why not make the usability of what you are creating as easy as possible for the person reading the e-mail.
• DO NOT use floats, background images, or positioning as most, if not all, e-mail clients do not recognize these. For a comprehensive list and comparison chart, visit Campaign Monitor's Guide To CSS in E-mail Clients.
• Try and keep the entire e-mail under 1MB. Just like websites, people do not want to sit their and wait for something to load. Use images, but make sure to compress them using an image editing program like Photoshop. Try messing with the Quality and not using 100% if you are using a lot of images.

Write Good Content – Use A Call To Action

Much like anything, you need to create great content. Content is still king. Write things that are interesting, that will grab the readers attention, and create a reaction, such as completing a sale or driving traffic to your website. Help grab their attention with a fancy subject line and compelling graphics. If you don't know what a Call To Action is, click here for some examples.

E-blast Campaign Services

There are a massive amount of e-blast campaign services, some of which are free for a month or for e-blasts under 500 recipients. Others charge monthly or pay-as-you go, which is a nice feature if you aren't sending a lot of e-mails.

The company I chose, and will continue to use is MailChimp. In my opinion, they are the best! They have tutorials to help you get started along with a huge list of resources. They also have this amazing option to import a .zip file of your design.

Basically, you build a template using your code editor of choice (I use Dreamweaver), .zip your HTML file, CSS file, and all of your images. Then bada-bing bada-boom. You have your e-blast. It really is an amazing, time-saving feature!

Some more option for you to look through for yourself:

• Campaign Monitor - Campaign Monitor offers everything a designer needs to run successful email marketing campaigns for themselves and their clients. You can even rebrand the interface, create sub-accounts for your clients and let them send their own campaigns.
• Constant Contact – Build, manage, and grow your customer and member lists with our step-by-step guide. We'll help you build permission-based lists the easy, affordable way, with Constant Contact.

How do you e-blast?

If you have any other tips, tricks, or resources to share and how you make your e-blast campaign successful, please share, as there is always room for learning and improvement.