After writing your newsletter, it is time to send it to your readers. Sending email newsletters may appear difficult for new newsletter publishers. However, the process is quite easy and it can be fully automated. In order to be able to dispatch your newsletter issues to your readership, you need to subscribe to a newsletter management software program or an autoresponder as it is commonly known. There are so many auto-responder services that you can choose from. And they offer a wide range of newsletter solutions for newsletter publishers.
Before you sign up to any autoresponder service, you need to take a look at the range of services they have to offer. An autoresponder usually help you manage all the different aspects and tasks of your newsletter. It enables you to collect subscriber details, create the newsletter, send the newsletter and analyze your newsletter data. Most automatic responder services provide their users with readymade signup forms that they can use to generate subscriptions. The autoresponder helps you automate the sending of your newsletter. In your admin panel, you can schedule your email newsletter sending.
First, you need to upload your newsletter articles to your autoresponder. Afterwards, you can set each article to be sent at a particular date. You can also set the order in which they are to be sent. Therefore, when someone subscribes to your newsletter, there is no need to worry about sending the newsletter to him as this will be automatically done. You can even have a welcome email sent to each new subscriber. In addition to send regular newsletter articles, the autoresponder gives the option of sending a newsletter issue to your entire subscriber base; this sort of issues is known as a broadcast.
You can also get statistics on the performance of your newsletter after sending it. Depending on your autoresponder service, you can get data on the number of subscribers, their countries, how many of them open your newsletter after they receive it, unsubscribe numbers and subscription form views. These data will help you spot any weaknesses that you might be having and eventually fix them.
If your newsletter is published in an HTML format, it is recommended that you send a text version along with the HTML one in case the readers’ email does not support HTML. Some email newsletter management programs prompt you to do this whenever you write or upload an article.
There are some free autoresponder services that you might be tempted to use. It should be noted though that most of these services are not professional and reliable. If you use these free services, there is no guarantee that your newsletter will reach the end user. Some of them are labeled as spam by email clients. Furthermore, they do not provide sufficient data on the performance of your newsletter. Among the best autoresponder services available we cite: Aweber, ConstantContact, iContact. There are a few good others as well. In order to ensure that your subscribers receive your newsletter, you can check it using an email spam checker. If it passes the test, you can be assured that it will not get blocked by email clients’ anti-spam filters.