Choosing Your Email Service Provider
- Look for a platform that offers a wide variety of templates to ensure your emails render properly across desktop, webmail, and mobile clients.
- Check out these top used Email Service Providers for small businesses: Benchmark Email, MailChimp, Vertical Response, and Constant Contact.
- Check if they support HTML code — this is what widgets and Looks & Collections are made of, and certain providers don't allow for these in emails (like MailChimp for example). If this is the case, you'll most likely be able to utilize text links to monetize, or you can link out to where your widget or shop page lives.
Content Creation
- Create a mobile-friendly format. Ensure your email is legible on mobile devices — consider text, image, and ‘call to action’ or CTA size.
- Write attention-grabbing subject lines. Tease the content of your email with your subject line and make people want to open and read more. Tip: avoid using the word “newsletter” here.
- Include a ‘call to action’ or CTA. It’s important for readers to understand what action they should take with the email. Consider: “Shop now,” or “Read more.”
- Get social. Add links to your social platforms in your email and always align your content across all platforms.
- Provide the best content possible. Keep your message clear, concise, and engaging. Test different copy, images, and topics to see what sparks the most engagement.
Sending & Tracking
- Find a send cadence. It’s important your readers know when to expect emails from you. This doesn’t have to be a strict calendar, but avoid sending multiple times per week and then disappearing for long periods of time.
- Optimize send time. Test sending at different times to see when you get the highest open rate and try out tools like Mailchimp to automatically deliver based on a subscriber’s time zone.
- Track your results. Keep note of the open rate and click rate of your emails. You'll want to know your average engagement so you have benchmark stats to compare to when you test content or send times.