Why You Should Be Sending Email Newsletters
I like sending out our email newsletters and I hope recipients find them useful and interesting. If you aren't yet receiving them, you can subscribe over there on the right! --->
Why Send Them?
For a few reasons - first and foremost, they bring in work, which is of course their aim. If your recipients are previous clients or potential prospects it may be they were thinking of kicking off a project and seeing your company name is the reminder they need to get going.
They're relatively easy to produce with a service like MailChimp, they probably take just over an hour to produce and they're usually free for under 3000 recipients.
Who to Send To?
Sending company news and new product offerings to existing clients makes sense. Prospects and potential customers, friends and anyone who's interested are other logical recipient choices.
How Often to Send Them?
This really varies depending on your business and the content of the email. VistaPrint used to send me more than one email per day once I'd used their services but this quickly became too much and I unsubscribed. However other lists I've signed up to send one very short email which is concise and to the point, and has value and daily is fine in that case. For most companies, fortnightly would be enough and monthly would probably be a minimum frequency.
How to Send Them?
MailChimp is a excellent service to send the emails out, it's free for medium sized lists (up to 3000 emails per month) and has reports on who has opened viewed or unsubscribed from newsletter.
It also provides the code to embed on your website for a sign-up form that automatically adds subscribers to its database.
In Conclusion...
Sending email newsletters is not that hard to do, it doesn't take that much time, fantastic online tools are available for free and it generates sales for your business.