Newsletter best practices

It is well-known that good promotion makes good sales. One of the most popular ways to promote the site is a newsletter.
With e-mails subscribers stay informed about the latest updates on your site and properly arranged e-mails can highly boost your sales.
However, reaching out people via e-mail may also harm your brand if you violate e-mail marketing rules.


Below is a list of recommendations from GetSocio that you should follow when setting up your newsletter:

1. From. This is the first information that subscribers see when receiving newsletter from you. This field must display the proper information about the sender. In GetSocio we show website's title in "From" field of e-mails, so you need to make sure that your site's title is relevant.
2. Subject. Usually subject represents the quick summary of e-mail content. But you have to be careful when setting up a subject for your newsletter. It should not be long, so try to keep it as comprehensive as possible. Moreover, the subject must not contain of exclamation marks, question marks and any other extra punctuation marks, as it will be considered as spam by e-mail service providers. It should be written in regular size, no caps, it should be unique among your other newsletter and, of course, the subject should be attractive to subscribers.
3. Content targeting subscribers audience. Obviously the newsletter is made of deals itself. This functionality is already designed in GetSocio and you should make a good use of it. It means that your newsletter should not get bored or frustrate your subscribers. This may happen if there are too many deals in the newsletter or the newsletter is sent daily with slight changes. That is why you should remember to add to newsletter new and the most popular deals to not be too salesy.
4. Content to avoid being spam. Building good e-mail reputation is a very hard work. Even one e-mail marked as spam may seriously harm your e-mail marketing reputation. That is why it is very important to follow content basics of anti-spam. This is about words that automatically considered by bots as spam, so-called "spam trigger words". These are the words that specify the unbelievable uniqueness of the advertised product/service, especially when it comes to medical and health goods, the words that indicate the incredible discounts (when there is too much of expression, like "best bargain", "absolutely free", etc). The list of such words is quite long, so we recommend you to make sure that you do not use notorious phrases when creating your deals and newsletter.
5. Unsubscribe link. You might think that unsubscribe link is not that needed, as when it is present the subscribers may easily unsubscribe at any time from your newsletter and, of course, you do not want to loose them. However, not having such link in your e-mails will lead to marking your newsletter as spam by people who do not want to receive it anymore. And major e-mail service providers track the statistics of spam clicks  - if there are some of them for certain sender, the sender can be blocked. Thus you should never remove unsubscribe link from your newsletter.
6. General information about newsletter. Usually marketing e-mail apart from its main content has a short description about why it was sent to this e-mail address (for example, "You received this e-mail because you subscribed for GetSocio newsletter").  This content is quite important because it reminds to those who are receiving it for the first times or those who have not received it in a while that they have manually subscribed for this marketing newsletter. It is important to not erase this standard wording from your newsletter.
7. It is all about your brand. Advertising some third-party services that are not a part of your deals business is a bad practice. You should remember that the main core of this newsletter is to promote Your company and Your deals. Do not try to kill two birds with one stone by earning money on advertising your and other business.
8. Contact e-mail address. The newsletter is being sent from standard e-mail address mail@yourdomain.com. To make sure you do not loose any follow ups from your customers, we recommend you to set up such e-mail address with your provider to be able to receive replies to your newsletter.