Despite all the excitement about social media, it seems the majority of people still want to get their marketing via email. So email newsletters are still a hugely important business tool.

Emails are easy, right? Like anything involving technology, the landscape is always changing. Here’s a few things to keep in mind for managing an email newsletter: 

• Many of your users will read it on their phones. So your email design & any pages it clicks through to should be mobile friendly.
• Online email clients (programs like Hotmail, Yahoo & Gmail) can strip out embedded style sheets from emails. So you need to embedd a lot of design information within HTML tags or it’ll be ugly.
• There are privacy laws, no less, regarding how you collect people’s contact details & use them. You need to know these.
• You need systems in place to manage even moderate sized recipient lists so you don’t get stuck with hundreds of out of office auto replies or manual unsubscribes.
• Direct marketing is a serious business. There’s lots of research to be aware of, such as times of the day & week that score the best email open rates.
• You need to know how to tag links in your emails with utm codes & evaluate open rates, click throughs & conversions.

Much like writing for the web, marketing emails are relatively easy to create. But there are many tricks for new players & successfully using emails to consistently generate business leads requires another level of sophistication. Professional advice can help set you on the right path.