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Email newsletters have become the go-to tool for internet marketers. We all know that they provide guaranteed reach, are much better at targeting, and offer a great opportunity for cross marketing.
Because it’s such a hot topic, in this hangout we’re going to talk about email newsletters and their implications especially when you’re targeting a significantly large client base.
Hi, good morning Richard.
Good morning
I’d like to ask you a few questions about email newsletters which are a very popular tool for our clients. First, what’s your understanding of an email newsletter?
An email newsletter is marketing tool used by businesses to advertise their products and services. Basically it involves sending a number of electronic letters to a list of customers. It’s a great way of promoting products on an ongoing basis as well as a cost effective way of keeping in touch with esteemed clients.
What are the implications for people who send newsletters from their WordPress websites?
When you send email newsletters to your customers, you’re more or less inviting these customers back to your website. You expect them to open their emails, read your newsletter and react by asking a question via email or clicking on a link in the letter.
The significance here is that your mailing list may be large so you’ll be triggering high spikes and traffic on your web server.
So, what can we do about issues such as high spikes?
Caching is the most obvious option. Since you’re likely to be redirecting customers to a handful of pages, a decent caching structure should be of great value. There is nothing worse than an email popping into a customer’s inbox and when they click on a link in the letter they find that the page request is too slow or that the website is falling over. Many times customers will give up halfway through or in adverse cases even lose interest in your product or service.
Do you have specific recommendations for people who send email newsletters via their WordPress websites?
How you put the newsletters together is very important. Often people want to embed images (one, two, or even more) onto the newsletters. You should consider hosting these images away from your web server, probably on a Content Delivery Network (CDN). Alternatively, you can set up a new server primary for hosting your images. They will still load and will still be visible on your email newsletters. Offloading your images is very important as it helps in reducing the amount of traffic that comes back to your web server.
Another very important factor to consider is how you deliver the email. For example, if you have 1,000 customers and you send them each an email at the same time, if you expect a large portion of these customers to click on something as a way of responding, then you should also expect an increased amount of traffic to your website. What you can do is to invest in one of the now common email delivery systems. Depending on your needs, you can choose a delivery program that allows you to send the emails over a period of time; so for example, you can deliver them in 2 hours, two, days, two weeks, and so forth – it affords you that kind of freedom. What you need to know is that delivering at once will cause a significantly higher traffic than delivering over an extended period of time.
Thank you Richard.
Thank you.