How many e-newsletters do you have sitting in your inbox at the moment? If you’re like me, you’ve got at least three, and of those three, you probably have a favorite, a middle-of-the-road and a least favorite.

Without a doubt, the popularity of e-newsletters has exploded in recent years, becoming an integral part of the marketing process. At a fraction of the cost of traditional mail, they provide an excellent, cost-effective means for communicating with your customers and prospects.

Immediacy is another benefit; you can write your content in the morning and have it in readers’ inboxes by lunch. Most importantly, e-newsletters can deliver instant feedback and response.

So how do you make sure your e-newsletter makes its way onto your audience’s "must-read" list? In this series I’ll explore tactics for creating a successful e-newsletter that is concise, informative and entertaining.

Even if you have the best-written e-newsletter in the world, if you can’t get people to want to read it, they won’t. So the first step is to create a permission-based e-newsletter. If readers aren’t opting in, then they’ll probably view your newsletter as spam and either block it or delete it without reading it.

We use Constant Contact for the Maine Marketing Association e-newsletter, but there are several good services that allow you to build and manage an opt-in e-mail list. Like Constant Contact, many of these can also be used to build a template for your newsletter and to handle the actual e-mailing for you. Another added benefit that some of these technologies deliver is the ability to track the response in terms of how many times the e-mail has been opened, how many people have clicked on certain links, and much more.

Once you’ve decided whether to handle the e-mail management in-house or through a third-party provider, you’re ready to start pulling together content. In my next entry, I’ll give you some tips for drawing readers in and making them want to read what you have to say.

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