A lot of companies use email to send out announcements and invitations to upcoming events.  If you are organizing a seminar, exhibition, a fair, or plan to participate in a big expo, it would seem logical to send your customers, partners and friends a letter of announcement and invitation to visit your event.

But do not get too excited, because your message may remain unread for several days.  Most people do in fact read messages within two business days, but a large group of people may not read your message until weeks after you send it, and after the event has already passed.  This is why timing could be critical in such situations.

The number of delayed reads is heavily dependent on your industry.  If most of your subscribers are heavy internet users or IT people, they will either read the email right away, or never.  If, on the other hand, your audience is made up of construction workers, it will certainly take more time for them to check their email.

Conclusion: send announcements and invitations ahead of time.  Make a preliminary announcement a month early, even if you do not know the exact date or place at that time.

The invitation should also be useful.  Consider the following situation.  A company sends out an invitation to its staff for a company event.  Let’s just say that the event was scheduled for November 20th.  The letter contained the event itinerary and a map with directions.  This how people would click.  They would open in the first few days and read the invite and click more on your website link to learn more.  And then on the day of the event or on the day before they would go back to your message and click more on the directions to print them out. 

Conclusion: People often use email as a bookmark which is used to access your site.  Consider this when you design the layout and content of your announcement or invitation, make it easy to use and people will be grateful.

If you know the cost of every subscriber, then you will know the amount of money you lose when your emails do not get delivered.  Marketers are often shocked at the increase in deliverability rates when they move their business to a better email service provider.  A few things are at play here, including technology and ESP reputation, which helps your emails avoid getting into the spam folder, rather than the inbox.

The formula for deliverability is: ((Sent-Bounced)/Sent)*100%.

Due to technical reasons this indicator is not as important as it used to be. An Open is only registered when the email client of the recipient downloads an image from the server, called a beacon. Spammers started using this method to check the existence of email addresses, and email clients stopped downloading images by default. Images are not loaded and opens are not registered. This is good for fighting spam, but bad for statistics. Considering the Opens rate can still be useful as a lower bound indicator, meaning that if your open rate is 30% you can be certain that at least 30% of recipients opened your emails. Opening a text-only version of the email is not registered either.

The formula for the opens rate is: (Opens/(Sent-Bounced))*100%

How many people clicked on a link in your message. This is the main indicator of subscriber interest. Consider the following analogy. You are a car salesman and invite your potential customer for a test drive. The number of customers who agree to a test-drive is your click-through rate.

The formula for the click-through rate is: (Unique clicks/(Sent-Bounced))*100%

To return to the previous analogy – not every test-driver buys the car, which is why you need a second indicator called conversion rate.

This is the number of subscribers that actually make a purchase. For retailers this can be estimated by calculating the size of purchases that originated from email campaigns. In order to achieve that you will need a way to track which customers came from email campaigns.

The formula for the conversion rate is: (Converted emails/(Sent-Bounced))*100%

This indicator shows the amount of subscribers who removed themselves from your mailing lists. They are not interested in your messages, which is why the opt-out. This indicator is the best way to tell whether or not your content sucks. It could happen after the first message or after the fourth…Consider conducting an audience retention analysis.

The formula for the unsubscribe rate is: (Unsubscribed/(Sent-Bounced))*100%

Many email marketers do not value the email of the individual subscriber as much as they should be. Knowing the value of one subscriber is important when budgeting resources for new subscriber attraction. If, for example the value of one subscriber is estimated at $100 than it would make sense to spend $10,000 to attract 10,000 new subscribers. But you should also keep in mind the integrity of your lists. If 90% of subscribers are lost after the first letter, something is definitely going wrong.

The formula for the value of a subscriber is (in yearly terms): Revenue from email marketing-cost of email marketing)/total subscribers*coefficient of subscriber retention.

Developing the design of your newsletter is similar to developing the design for a website. The design of a letter is also developed using html code, it has links, images, and so on. However it’s not that simple.

A newsletter (email) is a carrier of information. There are certain rules for email newsletter design; rule which make this process different from web pages.

Here is a checklist you can use to make sure your design is correct:

1. Links work and take the reader to the right landing pages.
2. Images have alternative text to be displayed when images aren’t loaded
3. The from name is correct
4. The from email is correct
5. The reply-to email is correct
6. The footer of the message corresponds to the letter content, written in the same language at least.
7. The name of the recipient is correct, gender is considered, contains alternative greeting if name cannot be determined.
8. The unsubscribe link works
9. The web version of newsletter works

You will probably come up with your own checklist during the design process, but this should do for now.

A welcome message is a message that gets sent out whenever a person subscribes to a newsletter service. Some of the welcome messages out there are awful in terms of design, marketing, and even plain common sense.

Someone who recently became interested in your products, service or content; interested to the point of actually registering for your subscription…and what do you send to that person? A welcome message.

Several tips about the right things to include in your welcome message:

1. Tell the person that the subscription was a success.
2. Provide instructions that describe how to edit the subscription.  If you have newsletters ranging across multiple topics provide a link to the preference center where new topics can be added or removed from the current subscription.
3. Thank the readers
4. Remind people about the subject of your newsletters and how often it comes out.
5. Remind people about the usefulness of your newsletter.
6. Provide the ability to instantly leave feedback.  You value the opinions of your subscribers.
7. Don’t write like a robot, use a human tone (unless your brandbook prohibits that).  Sign the letter with a human name – that of the editor, director, or manager.
8. Don’t use too much technical or marketing jargon. 
9. Reward the reader for his or her interest by giving some kind of bonus, for example:
10. A copy of the most interesting article from the archive
11. A discount coupon
12. A document available for download only for subscribers.
13. Provide a link to your Privacy Policy where you explain that the emails of your subscribers are safe with you.
14. If the subscription process is one-step, provide a link to delete the subscription right away, becaseu it could have been a mistake.
15. Remind readers that  adding you to their address book is desirable to avoid delivery mistakes.
16. Do not forget about branding.  Provide the name of your company and full contact information.