Electronic newsletters provide an effective and powerful mechanism of sharing information about your organization or topics of interest to your audience. Electronic newsletters are typically e-mailed to subscribers on a regular basis. They can contain whatever information your organization finds relevant, but should be informative and interesting to newsletter subscribers. There are many types of software than can be used for managing subscriptions and publishing newsletters. Listservs can also be used to push newsletters to a distribution list.
Be sure to provide an easy mechanism for users to subscribe to your newsletter. This can be done via e-mail and/or a web-based form. It should also be very easy to unsubscribe from your newsletter – you should typically include an "unsubscribe" link directly within the newsletter e-mail. Be sure to avoid having your newsletter appear or act like spam or subscribers may think it is spam. Once your newsletter is marked as spam, it may not be delivered to ANY subscribers that use common spam filtering systems or online mail services (Gmail, Hotmail, etc.).
You can choose to have a very formal or even paid subscription newsletter or a very informal mailing, or anything in between. Consistency is important to attracting and keeping an audience. For best results, you can provide a brief summary of relevant items in the newsletter and a link to your or other sites for more information. This not only allows you to distribute much information in each newsletter, but can also drive traffic to your site.
A publicly accessible online newsletter archive also provides potential subscribers an idea of what your newsletter provides. It also will be searchable on search engines, thus increasing your site traffic and relevance. If you provide an online archive, be sure to provide a link within the e-mail newsletter to the online version – some users prefer reading online to within their e-mail program.
Newsletter accessibility is important, but relatively easy. E-mail newsletters can be sent as a plain link to the online newsletter, as a plain text e-mail, or as an HTML e-mail. A link drives traffic to your site, but requires an additional step for users to access the content. Plain text e-mails are by far the most accessible, but allo very limited styling and structure. Be sure to use blank lines to separate sections. *'s or –'s can be used to indicate headlines. HTML e-mails must be coded with accessibility in mind. While they support full styling and structuring, they can also be more difficult to keep accessible. Many e-mail programs do not support full HTML formatting, which can result in the HTML e-mail being very broken or even unreadable if it is overly complex.
It is typically best to provide subscribers an option to choose between HTML or text e-mails. If you do not provide this option, text-only or very basic HTML e-mail newsletters should be provided.