Setting up an email newsletter for your small business

You should be sending your email to customers and potential customers. It’s a simple and easy way to keep in touch with past customers and keep them updated on new services or products. And since you’ve worked with them in the past, you probably already have their email addresses.

But what about potential customers? If they visit your site and want a reminder to come back and look again later, they may sign up for a newsletter, if it’s obvious how to do so and doesn’t take much time. And even better, your readers can be your promoters: if you create good content, many people will forward emails to friends and family, who in turn may become interested in your business.

Content

One of the best examples of an email newsletter that I’ve seen is produced by Marcia Yudkin. It’s not exceptionally fancy – there’s no HTML and it’s just basic text, but she gives a little useful content about marketing in each newsletter and then refers readers to her website and her services.

You have a wealth of information about your business and it should only take you a few minutes to write a few tips down. Try lists if you’re having a hard time, like “The Top Ten Writers You Should Be Reading.”

Just remember:

• Don’t give away your trade secrets.
• Refer back to your site.
• Tell how you can help a customer do anything you talk about.

Sending It Out

You can maintain a list of email addresses by hand and copy and paste them for each new email, but that sounds like an awful lot of work, especially when there are plenty of online options that will maintain your list, for free. These three are just examples. Search around until you find the one that meets all of your needs.

• Letterpop: This site is fairly new, but it’s already my favorite. It’s got a neat little drag and drop interface, and a ton of different templates to make your newsletter look really good when you email it out. I do have a couple of complaints, however. Letterpop’s free account is very limited. You can only have 10 newsletters up at a time, meaning you have to delete old ones. You can only have 100 people on your email list, which, hopefully, won’t be enough for very long. And the premium account (a.k.a. the kind you pay for) doesn’t seem to be available yet.
• Your Mailing List Provider: This site makes it easy for your readers to opt-in. They help you put a link on your website and maintain the list so you can easily send out emails. You’re pretty much on your own for designing your newsletter, though. If you’re comfortable with text only, or you know a little HTML, that isn't a problem. There’s a limit of 1000 subscribers on the free account, but that’s a little more doable than 100.
• Yahoo!Groups: This is one of the simplest solutions. Readers tend to like this option, because a) they’ll be used to the interface if they already belong to a Yahoo!Group and b) they get a lot more control over how they receive their newsletters. Just keep in mind that, depending on your settings, your readers can easily send out information to the whole group. That can be good or bad.