Simon Payn's Effective Customer Newsletters

How to Use Twitter for Your Newsletter

Gotta love Twitter. It's like a world-wide networking party - without holding a glass of orange juice in one hand.

Here's how I use it to make my newsletter.

I tweet (and link to) anything I find online that I think would be interesting to my Twitter followers and my newsletter readers. After all, networking - and Twittering - is about adding value to your community.

One of the great things about Twitter is that you can re-tweet other people's tweets that you think are worthwhile and want to share.

Then, when it comes to putting together my newsletter, I visit my Twitter profile and go through my recent tweets to find articles online worth mentioning in the newsletter. I also find some of my own tweets that might be expanded into newsletter articles in themselves.

So Twitter becomes like a notepad of good ideas - a notepad I'm happy to share with the world.

The Best Way to Send Out Email Newsletters

A common question I receive from people interested in my real estate, mortgage and insurance customer newsletters is whether they can send them using their own email software rather than the hosted service I offer.

(With a hosted service, you upload your email list to a website, which looks after the design, list management and sending of your email newsletters.)

I strongly believe that anyone serious about sending email newsletters needs to use a professional email service.

Here's what I told someone who asked this very question yesterday:

Thank you for your message.

To answer your question, we only offer a "hosted" email service, which means you need to upload your list to the site.

Let me explain why this is the best way to do it.

The main reason is that you will comply with anti-spam regulations and protect your own email address from being added to spam blacklists.

But there are also several advantages to using a hosted service.

Avoiding spam problems: The U.S. CAN-SPAM regulations state that you need an easy way for people to unsubscribe from your list. A hosted service will provide links on each mail for people to use to unsubscribe - without this you will have to do it yourself. A hosted service will also help to protect you against false accusations of spam; hosted services have a good relationship with ISPs and between them they work to distinguish between erroneous spam allegations and true instances of spam. This will help protect your messages, helping more of them get delivered. And, because you are using a hosted domain to send messages from, your own email address will be protected from ending up on a spam blacklist (and you'll also avoid complaints from your own ISP for sending out bulk emails using your account).

Easier to design: Sending HTML emails using your own email software isn't as easy as just pasting in an HTML file. One reason is that you will need to host images if you are sending the email yourself - the images will need to be saved to your website, then your email will need to link to these images so that the recipients of your email can see them. A hosted service handles all this for you, and will allow you to add, subtract and move images without having to fuss with HTML code or having to contact your webmaster. A hosted service will also help ensure that your email design appears as it should on everyone's computer. (The thing about sending HTML in email is that, unless you design it very carefully, it doesn't always show up as you expect it to.)

Easier to manage your contacts: Hosted email services provide many tools for managing your contacts. These include flagging bad emails, duplicate emails and bounced emails to ensure your email list is kept clean and to make sure you don't send more than one email to your recipients. Hosted services can also tell you which of your recipients has opened the email and which links within that email they have clicked. This will help improve the content of messages in the future.

Easy way for people to join your list: Hosted services provide sign-up boxes you can place on your website so that people can join your list to receive your newsletter. An important success factor in online marketing is capturing the email addresses of people who visit your website so that you can star building a relationship with them. Hosted services make it easy to do that. (See the home page of my site for an example.)

More emails delivered: It's a fact of life that email newsletters are harder to deliver than they were in the past, mainly due to the quantity of spam and the sensitivity of filters designed to combat that spam. The result is that many genuine emails - particularly if they are designed in HTML - get blocked. Hosted services have a good track record of getting emails delivered because that's their main job - they work very hard at working with every party in the process to distinguish their emails from spam.

Anyway, these are the main reasons why a hosted service is preferable. I have personally been using a hosted service for many years and would never return to sending these kind of emails from my own email account.

I believe that anyone who is serious about email marketing should follow this route.

Please let me know if you have any other questions.

All the best,
Simon

So here's a question for anyone involved with email newsletters: do you agree with my analysis? Is there anything missing? Are there any errors? Please leave a comment below.

Issuu: A Way to Put Your Print Newsletter Online

If you've visited the website belonging to a glossy magazine, you've probably seen an online facsimile of the magazine - a little widget they use to allow you to "flip" pages of the real magazine...but online.

That kind of technology was quite expensive. But now there's a website, called Issuu, that is doing the same thing...for free.

It's a great way to put your newsletter online. What you need do is create a PDF of the document, upload it to Issuu and then embed it on your site.

Here's one I made earlier. Click on it to get a bigger version. (You can also embed the larger version direct on your site, with a little HTML coding.)

How to edit pictures for your newsletter

Photos are perhaps the hardest part of a newsletter to get right. If you don't edit them properly, there's a danger they will print poorly, which will harm the overall quality of your newsletter.

The most common problems are using a resolution that's too low and cropping the image badly.

The resolution for printing should be at least 200dpi, and ideally 300dpi. This means most pictures you find on the web, which are at 72dpi, aren't good enough.  If you choose a resolution that's too low, the picture might look like this one on the right:

If you crop a photo, you need to make sure that the cropped area is large enough to be meaningful in your newsletter. The picture on the right is an example of a badly cropped photo - it's hard to see what animal is in the picture.

The best way to handle photos is with software such as Photoshop or Photoshop Elements. However, not everyone has these, and they can be expensive to buy.

There are, however, lots of online resources to help you manipulate your photos. Many of them are free.

Snipshot: An online image editor that lets you resize, crop and enhance photos. You just browse for them on your computer, edit them and save them again.

Picnik: Another online editor. This works in a similar way to Snapshot. Perhaps the most user-friendly interface.

Pixenate: Another online photo editor. Perhaps less easy to use, but it has a wide range of features.

When you save photos,  make sure you save them at the original size so that you maintain a high resolution.

For other useful online image tools, Mike Sansone at ConverStations gives us this list, which contains sites useful for many types of design work.

• Color Blender: Just found this the other day, but I'm already hooked. Choose a color and get a 6-color matching palette (a "blend"). You can modify the blend with different variations
• HTML Color Converter: I use this almost as much as a coffee cup. I often get stuff delivered with RGB colors and need to convert them.
• Color Palette Generator: Upload a photo and get a color palette matching the image.
• Forget Photoshop: 15 Online Graphics Generators: The folks at Mashable list some great tools for buttons and backgrounds

If you know of any others, add them in the comments section or in your own blog. Tell Mike's blog about them too!

Update on the Kinko's service

I've used the Kinko's print online service now. Go to the original post to find out how I got on.

Entrepreneur's guide to Web 2.0

Once upon a time, if you wanted book-keeping software, a word processor or a customer relationship management database, you'd have to go out and buy some (expensive) software which you'd then have to install on your computer.

One of the great things about the whole Web 2.0 thing is that hundreds of companies have sprung up offering these kind of services online -- and often for no charge. (Indeed, my Ready to Go Newsletters is almost Web 2.0 -- it's free and you sign up for it online.)

There are all sorts of other applications the web has made possible that make communication, planning, accounting and organizing a whole lot easier.

Today Rich McIver sent me his list of 25 useful Web 2.0 sites -- it includes applications that will make your life as a business owner easier.

Take a look at: The Entrepreneur’s Guide to Web 2.0: Top 25 Apps to Grow your Business

Random thoughts on being an entrepreneur

Check out Hugh Macloed's post on his Gaping Void blog -- Random thoughts on being an entrepreneur.

This is a blog worth subscribing to, by the way.