Salon Privé e-Newletter

This newsletter was designed to be informative, avoid the spam filters, and to create the right feel for the brand.

A well thought out e-newsletter can really improve the success of a business

A carefully communicated campaign can act as an ambassador for your company promoting its products, services and its ethos.

What makes a good newsletter?

There are several reasons why internet users may subscribe to a newsletter; It may be used as an informative way of communication or to update people on recent news and events that are happening, or It could be used as a means to sell goods or products.

Both uses have one important aspect in common to make them work – length and clarity. Users will receive a lot of emails each day to their inbox, and are only prepared to spend a finite amount of time on each one, so the objective is to communicate as clearly and effectively as possible.

Because a user’s attention span is shorter when reading a newsletter it has to attract the reader in a split second. Points to consider are :

• The initial subject heading
• How the main copy is written
• Is the main subject being communicated effectively
• What is the benefit to them for taking the time to read the newsletter.

Users have a more emotional reaction to newsletters than websites. Surfers who visit a website are looking for something, just like you might if you go shopping in the high street – a website is used more as a tool. Conversely, a newsletter drops into your inbox just like a personal visit, thus creating a personal bond between the user and the website.

Subscribing and unsubscribing

Ideally users should be able to do both of these in less than one minute. The longer this takes, the less impressed with your website the user will be. They have made their mind up, why slow them down?

Why don’t people unsubscribe if they’re not interested?

There are number of reasons for this:

• Emotional attachment
  Even though users may not read the emails anymore, they’re reluctant to unsubscribe because they don’t like to sever the relationship between them and the sender
• Time limitation
  The user expects that it will take a long time to go through the unsubscribe process, so puts it off for another time
• Being wary of unsubscribe links
  Some users may be reluctant to unsubscribe in the fear that it validates their email address, and may encourage the company to sent even more emails. This is largely a myth, and although it may have happened in the past, the vast majority of  newsletters sent out these days are genuine.

Users that do unsubscribe

If users do unsubscribe, let them go as soon as you can. Continually sending newsletters and emails to users that no longer want to receive them will agitate them, and put your company in a bad light.

Image vs Text based emails

It’s very unlikely that you’ll be able to get 100% consistency throughout all email clients, so sometimes you have to think about your own business, and what the most efficient way of communicating to your users would be.

An image based email might suit a high class brand such as Apple selling a product that can only be done justice by showing it as an image. Other reasons for using image based emails might be that a lot of your customers use AOL. AOL strips out any formatting, and leaves just the bare HTML. A text based email can look very bad in these conditions and you can be sure an image based email will look more or less exactly as it is supposed to look. Disadvantages of image based emails are that they may take longer to download, the email client may block out the images, or worse still, may assume that it’s spam, and delete it.

A text based email would suit a more informative style with more writing in it. They’re quicker to download, and less likely to be sorted as spam. Disadvantages are that they can look a bit dull.

You can of course choose a mixture between the two, thus keeping the email clients happy, and giving the users something to read whilst the images are downloading. A disadvantage would be the time it takes to produce the email, and the slight unpredictability in how each email client reads the formatting.

The pit falls of newsletters

A common problem is for companies to send out too many newsletters, and thus demand too much of their subscriber’s time. When sending a newsletter out, think about the following points:

• Why will our subscriber benefit from this newsletter?
• When was the last time a newsletter was sent out?
• What do our subscribers say they like about our newsletters and does this fulfil their expectations?
• Will this newsletter be of interest to our subscribers?

There are times such as Christmas or Valentine’s when users expect (and hope) to get newsletters. During peak trading periods such as these, our research tells us that subscribers are looking for inspiration, and welcome an increased number of newsletters. This is the exception though. As a general rule, it’s good to send newsletters with some frequency, so readers can expect when to receive them, which may prevent the newsletters being mistaken for spam and deleted.

Different email clients look at newsletters in different ways. Some strip out any style sheets, some block images and some might mark them as spam, and delete them. This is one of the reasons why you can benefit from using an experienced company such as Design Fidelity to create your newsletter.

What is Rich Media? 

It’s the funky looking fully animated creative you see on web portals such as MSN and Yahoo. It can also show video previews, and be fully interactive. 

Rich media has dramatically increased in popularity since the birth of broadband, and can be seen all over the internet. A good rich media ad campaign can improve a click-through rate by 10 times that of a normal banner ad. 95% of rich media is created in Flash.

What is Flash?

Flash is a computer application that enables you to produce interactive animated web content. Other than using Flash for advertisement, it’s also used for presentations, websites, and is even used in some car stereo and mobile  phone displays.

Flash reduces load times by delivering action-packed content with very minimal download times.

What we can do?

Design Fidelity has experience with designing in Flash, and can produce rich interactive banner ads, flash websites, and web-based video presentations. Please contact us for more details.

Why not use Flash all the time?

• It can be quite time consuming to program in Flash, so costs tend to be a little higher than programming or producing creative in more conventional ways
• Although Flash is improving, there are W3C issues with accessibility of flash based web sites
• Flash can sometimes be unnecessarily in websites when another medium could be more appropriate