Newsletters

Email newsletters can be hard to do right. Chances are, you receive a number of these already and wish you didn’t. On the other hand, when they contain useful information, you become upset when they don’t appear in your inbox. That’s the kind of newsletter Dave Atkins Media wants to create for your business.

An email newsletter is a way to keep your customers and clients thinking about you and referring you to others. You could simply maintain your own list of addresses and then send periodic emails (please bcc everyone though, so you do not let everyone see your entire client list or reply-all!) but it can be hard to keep that looking professional and consistent.

Email marketing services like Constant Contact, Vertical Response, and Listrak will send and manage your newsletters for a monthly or per-mailing fee. For a small business with fewer than 500 email subscribers, this is approximatley $15/month. These services also include reporting–allowing you to see how many people actually read your newsletter and how many click through to your web site.

Dave Atkins Media can help you decide whether an email list is appropriate, choose the most cost-effective list service, and create a re-usable email template. Our experience in larger companies and government organizations has taught us the following:

• you should decide on a standard look and feel/design and stick with it. You don’t have time to be tweaking the design every week.
• you should be consistent and judicious. Don’t commit to a weekly newsletter unless you know you will have something to say every week. Don’t spam people with daily emails unless you are a news service. If a quarterly update is appropriate, stick to a schedule.
• the biggest challenge is content. In large companies with weekly newsletters…the whole week was structured around finding, writing, editing, revising, approving content. You need a plan to avoid that.

Dave Atkins Media will create a clean, simple template that complements your web site and includes standard links back to contact information and any updates, etc. on your web site and/or blog. We will set up the newsletter to comply with anti-spam laws and configure it with a reliable service that will ensure your emails do not end up in junk mail folders. We will work out an editorial calendar–a simple plan for how to choose content for the newsletter. These are all components of developing an Email Marketing Plan with an emphasis on making it something we can execute painlessly, consistently, and reliably.

Setting up a newsletter is similar to the web site set-up: we will choose a hosting service that you will pay for independently, then there is an initial design/set-up cost. Once you have been set up you can choose to either compose and send the newsletters yourself or contract with Dave Atkins Media to produce the newsletters on a per-send basis.