A comprehensive email marketing program consists of several different communications: promotions, events, special offers, shipping confirmations. While all of these emails are vital to your company, your email newsletters are critical in building relationships with your customers.

When creating an email newsletter, be it daily, weekly, or monthly, it is important to make sure you have relevant content for your audience that is designed to keep them engaged. All of your emails are about your company brand, but your newsletter’s content must connect with your reader. If your content does not positively impact some part of your reader’s life, they will not be interested. When writing your newsletter, it is important to write about relevant and interesting subjects that your audience will appreciate. The more your newsletter is about your subscribers and the more value your articles provide, the longer your audience will stay with you. For more tips on email newsletters, click here.

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It’s no secret that we at Blue Sky Factory really love the articles posted by ClickZ, and this week’s “ClickZ Experts” newsletter is no exception. In this edition Karen Gedney recalls a few instances of companies making unfortunate errors in their email campaign, all of which could be avoided by simply checking work before hitting “Send.”

Karen proposes that every e-marketer create and use a checklist while setting up the campaign and launching, and I whole-heartedly concur with that idea. She outlines a great starter checklist that can be adapted to any marketer’s situation.

Take a look at her example here and consider adopting this practice yourself!

Jakob Neilson’s latest Alertbox dubbed “Email Newsletters: Surviving Inbox Congestion” has been posted. I urge you to take a few minutes to read about the conclusions of this research, which studies the way people interact with newsletters and inbox clutter. Here is the good news, the study was originally conducted two years ago, and the new research shows that newsletter usability has gone up even in the challenging information overload cluttered inbox.

“Our main conclusion remains the same: Email newsletters are the best way to maintain customer relationships on the Internet.”

Here is a quick overview of the research conducted:

We conducted our new study using an eyetracker with 42 participants. Using eyetracking technology, we recorded where users looked on websites as they subscribed or unsubscribed to email newsletters. We also recorded how users looked at their inboxes and how they read individual newsletters.

We tested 117 email newsletters, as follows:

• We tested 12 newsletters systematically (using a controlled methodology to ensure that all newsletters were used evenly).
• We tested 40 newsletters in a less controlled manner (users picked newsletters that most interested them from an inbox, and some newsletters were read much more than others).
• We tracked users’ eye movements as they read a total of 65 newsletters from their personal inboxes. By definition, each of these newsletters was read by a single user.

Check out the complete article here.

Larry Chase is a veteran email newsletter expert, having started his own email newsletter back in 1995. He’s put together a list of best practices that he’s learned over the years. Check it out here.

The tips aren’t necessarily surprising, but it’s good to know that a time-tested newsletter is finding success using these techniques, and adds credibility to his recommendations.

I think #2. What can you give them that they don’t already have?, and #8. Read Your Newsletter Out Loud…. are two really good ideas that most people don’t seem to think much about.

Email Newsletters are a no-brainer for every business, whether they have a website or not.

These tips will help make any newsletter more successful!