I’ve been creating email newsletters either for myself or for clients for probably about 8 years.
I started designing these things back when I was heavily into promoting The Site at MANOVERBOARD and gathered steam with about 400 subscribers. I created simple HTML emails that would highlight the artist being exhibited on The Site and then I would send them out from my 14K or 56K modem 20 or 30 at a time until they were delivered. My ISP at the time (Interport, long live Interport) couldn’t handle more than 30 emails at a time.
The Site is now more or less kaput and has run out of steam on its own (my own?) accord. In any case, I’ve used a number of good to average online email marketing solutions to send emails for MANOVERBOARD and for many clients over the past 3 years. There has been mixed success. The statistics one can gain from tracking emails sent to your loyal followers is insanely detailed; what I mean is that an email sender typically knows a tremendous amount of information about the quality of the emails they are sending by looking at the “open” and “click-through” rates of those emails. Some server-side email software can also tell you what visitors clicked on what links, which is both scary and cool if you’re a senstive marketer like me.
Regardless, I’ve found a new email newsletter home at CampaignMonitor which seems to totally rock. I’ve had a few successes with it and I’m relaunching The Telegraph, a MANOVERBOARD newsletter that has sadly been in winter hibernation because of a project called Overload (see previous post). Long story long, Seth Godin wrote a short, cogent piece last week about email marketing and he’s spot on: good marketing takes time, knowing your audience, catering to their needs and whims, and being consistent. What more is there? I’m planning on re-applying this idea to all my newfound email projects with my new email newsletter application.
[For a future post: Commentary and explication of the dearth of solid, useful information on the Web about email marketing, email technologies, HTML vs text emails, email clients, and email delivery systems.]