Tina Stewart was recently published in CMO.com read the article: Digitally Connecting Through Surround Sound Marketing

I’m sure many of you are busy creating content for your customers every day. That’s what we marketers do. We produce targeted content that is valuable, educational and segmented by target audience – providing information that is important to them and communicates our message. One type of regular content many of us distribute to customers is the newsletter. The format lends itself well to targeting (with space for different types of content that can be tailored to the audience), it’s good for segmenting (easy to track who is opening/opting-in and gather data on how your audience is responding), and it keeps current customers updated on what is happening with your company, your products and your brand. Most importantly, it is a useful tool to engage new customers and add to your list.

While they are an extremely valuable tool, newsletter can be tricky. How do you get customers to open them, read them and take action – whatever that action might be? In an effort to help marketers improve newsletter content, distribution and deliverability, we wanted to share some best practices we see and use every day:

• Start with a Clean House:  Practicing list cleaning and maintenance is critical for two reasons: it improves email deliverability and enhances your online reputation. For a newsletter, once you’ve established an opt-in list, it’s imperative to nurture it consistently to get the best results. Proactively and systematically cleaning out bad email addresses on a regular basis and eliminating the unsolicited, incorrect, out-of-date or duplicated addresses improves campaign performance and ensures better delivery, not to mention makes you look smart and savvy.
• Segment, Target, Repeat: Once your list is clean, keep it that way.  Implement a double opt-in registration process, which involves sending a confirmation email asking subscribers to verify that they actually do want to opt in. Segmentation has been shown to drive double-digit conversion improvements and larger purchases. It also helps you understand results and trends based on demographics and other audience-specific factors. The bottom line is this:  it's always better to have a smaller list of receptive subscribers than a big list of people who are not engaging with your company.
• Dedicated IP Address = Better Deliverability: It sounds simple, but we also discovered that having a dedicated IP for the newsletter resulted in better deliverability. Taking this extra step will ultimately help your messages get to the audience you intend.
• Test, Measure, Evaluate: Before, during and after every campaign, leverage analytics to consistently and predictably meet the unique needs of all your subscribers . As an example, we recently sent out the Lyris newsletter to 1,000 active and inactive subscribers first before distributing it to the entire list. Based on the data we got back, we were able to better understand Was the creative effective? What areas were the most clicked? Were people responding to our contest? Could we restructure the content to get better results? The answers to these questions helped us make necessary adjustments, which made broad distribution even more successful.

At the end of the day, these best practices help Lyris and our customers achieve better results and demonstrate the value of the newsletter in the larger context of the overall digital marketing campaign. Want to see for yourself? Check it out here: http://www.lyris.com/newsletter/subscribe.html

And in the spirit of sharing, we’d love to hear what you are doing with your newsletters to generate interest in your company. Let us know what is and isn’t working for you in our Lyris Digital Café.

Attend this week’s webinar:  The Future of Email: 2011 Trend Watch
Tuesday, August 30, 2011 10:00 AM Pacific / 1:00 PM Eastern

View last week’s webinar with Forrester Research:  2011 Email Marketing Trends and Truths
Presented by: Guest speaker Shar VanBoskirk, Vice President, Principal Analyst, Forrester Research, Inc. and Lyris Senior VP of Marketing, Tina Stewart

About the Author

Tina Stewart (@socialTIS) is Senior VP Of Marketing at Lyris.