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How do I send my newsletter?

When you have decided to do a newsletter, there are a number of ways to send it with varying levels of sophistication and abilities. In the table below are the four most common ways to send emails and the advantages and disadvantages of each.



Explanations:
Set up time: how long does it take to get this solution up and running compared to the other solutions?

Technical skills required: is it simple and straight forward to do, or does it require some techie smarts?

Personalized/targetted emails: can you easily personalize your emails, e.g., "Dear Mary", or send emails to a specific group of people, e.g., customers who live in a particular area or who have purchases a particular type of product? This does require you have the data available to do that.

Minimizes spam flagging: there are various things the email solution can do to trigger spam filters. There is technical stuff like SPF, there is negotiation with major ISPs for automatic white listing (for example, they have done a deal with AOL to make sure all emails sent from that solution automatically bypass the spam filters), and tools to inspect the emails for possible spam keywords.

Manges your email lists: Does the solution offer the ability for people to subscribe and unsubscribe automatically, and to manage bounces?

Tracking abilities: if you want information such as how many emails failed, how many links and which links were sent, etc, then you need a solution that can track this.

Easy to do split testing: split testing is sending slightly different versions of the email to two groups to see how they respond. For example, if you have a database of 5,000 email addresses, you could create two versions of your newsletter with different copy, subject, graphics, or whatever you want to test. Send each email to a group of 500 people, see which one performs best (this usually requires tracking abilities as well), and then send the better one to the remaining 4,000 people.

Examples: the examples above are not recommendations or endorsements, simply examples of the type of software being described.

The data above is typical for that category of software. It does not mean that all software in that category has that limitation or feature, simply that most do.

Recommendation:

For a small shop, the newsletter function built into most shopping cart software will suffice. If your database exceeds a few thousand, you should seriously consider upgrading to a hosted email vendor.