Our clients often spend hours writing content for their email bulletin and then laying this out in their chosen email system. Unfortunately this is no good if they do not also spend time checking that it is compatible with the wide variety of email clients out there (Gmail, Hotmail, Outlook etc.) and also that the email does not go straight to junk mail for appearing to be ’spam’.

What can I do?

Each email system whether it is Gmail, Hotmail, Yahoo or Outlook has its own rules on how to render your email on screen. By sticking to some formating guidelines, which we have found through experience, your email should be displayed as you intended.

Another problem is Junk mail or SPAM filters, as emails arrive these filters determine whether they should be immediately routed into the trash can. One of the most effective ways to avoid this ‘trashing’ is to get your recipients to add your email address to their safe senders list.

How we can help

We worked with several clients on their e-newsletters and have helped them increase their audience through simple steps such as those outlined above. If you want to find out more please contact us and we will be happy to talk through your specific needs.

As an example one of our clients requested our help with their bulletin as part of a larger project to move their website to new branding. We took the opportunity to reformat the bulletin and ‘clean’ the template so that it provided the best compatiblity with the various email clients out there.

RAISER’S EDGE USERS – ARE YOU USING ALL YOUR EMAIL ADDRESSES?

Beyond formatting the e-newsletter we also looked at the client’s email address data. One of the ‘features’ of the Raiser’s Edge, their database system, is that emails can get lost in the system through no fault of the users. Due to this some of their customers are not being sent the e-newsletter simply because data is not stored in the correct field. We are now working with the client to move the data to the correct place, cleaning it in the process and we will then add these emails to their circulation lists.

Email data that has been passed to you by your customers is particularly valuable. Not only is it hard to find email addresses but when you customers have passed the data to you they have usually agreed to your using it to communicate with them – something that is a legal requirement thesedays. This process of finding emails that you already hold but are not using is therefore particularly useful.