E-Newsletters - Common mistakes from 2010 and how to avoid them

End of Term Report 2010 - Email Newsletters I subscribe to a lot of email newsletters and although many of them are excellent some make fundamental mistakes, even those sent by very large companies. At the end of the article are some blog links which will help you avoid such errors. Here's my list of this year's common mistakes 1 Failure to include an unsubscribe link or where they have included one they have made it difficult to locate. Making it easy to unsubscribe will improve your list quality. 2 Contact details are not prominent. Subscribers will not go hunting for your phone number or email address. 3 The call to action is not clear and not prominent. What is it you want the subscriber to do? Call a number? Book now? Register here? 4 The subject line is poor. Subject lines should sell as well as tell what's inside. 5 The layout is poor with no clear distinction between articles and sometimes no prominent headlines. 6 The layout contains a large proportion of images to text or is entirely made up of images. This will trigger spam filters. 7 The e-newsletter width is too wide. I recommend 600px if possible and 630px as a maximum. This is because more emails are being read on smartphones these days. 8 There is too much content. I received one recently which was five pages long! 9 The content is dull, often because the author is wrapped up in their own world and fails to consider what will be of relevance to subscribers. Write it then sleep on it. I guarantee you will change your content the next day! 10 Business to business (B2B) emails being sent overnight or at the weekend.  B2B emails need to land in subscribers' inboxes during the working day to have more chance of being read. 11 The e-newsletter has not been tested across the main email clients and therefore doesn't display correctly in Outlook, GMail and/or Hotmail. 12 Broken links. Ensure you send yourself a test email and check that all links are working. Help is at hand!  Here are some previous blog posts which address some of the points raised above. • Why sending your B2B email newsletter overnight is a bad idea • Why you should make it easy to unsubscribe • Why your newsletter may no longer look right in Hotmail and how to fix it • Why your e-newsletter subject line is important • How to generate great content for your e-newsletter