Email Newsletter Tips

• Maybe you’re writing articles or blog posts that you want to list or summarize in your email. Good idea! But those long URLs you put in your email body might get chopped in email threads; so you should use a free URL shortener like Bit.ly to shorten them before putting them in your email.
• Bit.ly is self explanatory, easy to use, & even provides great tracking! As long as you login before creating your shortened URLs, it will track every time someone clicks on them & give you great data breakdowns and charts for free.
• You should ask people to share your email with others for this reason. So have a call-to-action at the bottom that says “Know anyone who could benefit from this info? Please forward this email to your colleagues and friends!”
• You probably need a legal opt-out statement at the bottom of your email; you should be able to find a boilerplate statement on the web that you can put into these types of email blasts that allows people to tell you they don’t want anymore email blasts like this from you.
• When you put your email signature at bottom – you might go ahead & put your email there also. I know it seems redundant since you’re the one sending the email, but I can tell you how many times I’ve received a forwarded email, or even just trying to send a new email to someone (outside of the old long e-trail) via mobile. If your email address is listed in your signature, it makes it easy for people to click on & send you a new email address, or gives people a whole block of your contact info to copy and paste to their own lists.
• Also your email signature might be cleaner if it said “example.com” (with a link) instead of “https://www.example.com/”
• You might consider having an email newsletter template. They’re free in some email marketing software – they can be setup, branded & easily reused. You would then be able to login to the email software each time, easily input your text & any images, & send it to your list or pre-schedule it or select who you do or don’t want to send it to.
• In future, might even set up your newsletter to auto-post to the back of your website as well. It won’t benefit much if the content is only summaries of the posts you’ve already posted on your site. But if you put other content into your newsletter (such as upcoming seminars or events) then you wouldn’t have to write it twice; it could post directly to a section of your website & help SEO there at the same time (because more content on your website helps SEO).

Thanks for reading. & of course we can help set it all up if you like as well!
Jake Aull, Zen Fires