Newsletters
Content Management
Icon Website Design, LLC puts the power of the internet newsletter in your hand! With an online newsletter, you can deliver this to your client in an old-fashioned email, or we can design your site to provide not only e-mail delivery but also blog posts, RSS feeds, social media updates, and more!
Understanding the formatting of newsletters is another wealth of knowledge that Icon Website Design possesses. Our customers should offer their reader a choice of HTML (formatted with different fonts and graphics included) or plain text ASCII (nothing but typed words). We offer the choice because some email programs do not interpret HTML newsletters properly. Fonts are often garbled, font sizes vary widely, colors cannot be controlled, and curly quotes, some punctuation such as the m-rule, as well as accented letters both native and foreign, are often mangled. Some services offer "multipart" newsletters that are HTML newsletters with an alternative plain text ASCII part, also known as a text translation. Subscribers with an email program that cannot display HTML newsletter will see the ASCII part instead.
The only format guaranteed to go through is straight plain text ASCII. And that's OK. ASCII newsletters are easy to read, and with a little creativity can still look good. ASCII forces you to keep your email short with links to the site. We want them to come to your website which is better designed to tell your story and make the sale.
Good ESPs have relationships with AOL, MSN, Yahoo!, Google, Hotmail, and others to help make sure your emails into their systems aren't classified as spam. Do it yourself, and you stand a good chance of being blocked. ESPs usually have good systems for managing bounced emails. Was it returned because the box was full or because the address is not valid? ESPs will automatically re-mail to the full box, and remove the address from the list if it is no longer valid.
Your mailing list is also managed online. You can upload your existing list, and new subscribers can join directly from your website without you having to do a thing. All of them use a "double opt-in" system. With double opt-in, subscribers type their email addresses into a form on a web page or in an email and click the submit button. They then instantly get an email welcoming them and confirming they actually did subscribe. They must click on a link in the email which activates their subscription. This guarantees that you have a clean list and that people are not entering other people's emails. Subscribers can change their email address and unsubscribe if they want.
Emails are sent out addressed to the individual, one at a time. If you send them out with Outlook or your usual email program using the BCC feature, there is no personal address, and chances are the email will go directly into the spam bucket. In addition, your in-house email program or your current email service will not likely let you send more than 50-100 emails with a click, so sending out a large list is a major pain fraught with hazard (you do not want to send two emails to the same person).
