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The World Wide Web is seemingly overwhelmed by new marketing techniques, but email remains one of the most efficient ways of connecting with existing and potential customers. Good email marketing is targeted, cost effective, and allows you to develop relationships and generate immediate results. eNewsletters are a popular form of email marketing and are widely used among medium to large businesses. Smaller businesses tend to disregard this powerful online marketing tool. Although they require a bit more work than one-page marketing emails, they are a very good way to connect your business with your customers and prospects as well as your partners and employees, whatever the size of your business.

iSmart Bulletin and iSmart Announce provide you with quick and easy email marketing solutions. With iSmart Bulletin, nothing's easier than sending a press release or a one-page enewsletter within a minute. With iSmart Announce, you can build a multi-page enewsletter in the form of an abstract with links back to the articles. However, before being able to send out your emails and enewsletters in a record time, you will first need to carefully prepare them.

This 6-step tutorial will help you fasten the preparation of your marketing emails and enewsletters.

Step 1: Select a target audience

Selecting a target audience is the first step to successful email marketing. You will not communicate with existing and potential customers the same way. You should have a clear idea of who is going to receive your email. The more targeted your audience is, the more relevant your email will be. In short, always keep in mind your audience when building an email. We also recommend you to allow the visitors of your website to subscribe to your enewsletter by filling in their email address through a subscription function. This first step is essential; ignoring it would be a huge mistake.

Step 2: Provide relevant content

Once you have accomplished the first step, you should be able to provide content relevant to the audience. By providing relevant content, you will gain interest, and possibly start building relationships and even start generating results. Try to imagine yourself as the recipient of the email. Avoid repetitive and boring content that no one wants to know about. Content can be considered as the most important part of the email, as some people may simply ignore what's around. If you don't really know what to talk about, ask people around you. Your colleagues or customers might have some great ideas. It actually depends on your business and how you want to connect with the recipients you have selected, but business people tend to appreciate testimonials and case studies. You may also have some stories to tell, as long as they are interesting and relevant to your audience, although stories may be more suitable for multi-page enewsletters.

Step 3: Select a date and time

You also need to select a date and time. Make sure you have enough time to prepare, design, build and test the email or enewsletter you're about to send. You're probably the only one to find out what the best time to send an email to your clients is. But if you can't, we recommend you to send it on a Tuesday, as a result of our latest email marketing research. Internet users tend to take the time to read their emails on Tuesday, more than on Monday when they're too busy. If you've subscribed to iSmart's enewsletter, you may have noticed you usually receive the email on Tuesday.

Step 4: Start building the content

1 Subject Select an appropriate subject line that either is questioning the recipient or goes straight to the point. In the first case, the recipient might be intrigued and decide to find out more. In the second case, the subject line should be very informative about the content of the email. Avoid uninteresting and mysterious subject lines. In the case of a multi-page enewsletter, make sure the title is clear. Give a name to your enewsletter. We call ours iSmart News.

2 Header The head banner should be appropriately sized. Large banners are tempting but if the recipients have the images switched off in their email client, only a large white box will appear at the top of the email. It's not a good start, scrolling down shouldn't be the first thing to do when opening an email. Remember that branding is important, so make sure you make the most of your head banner.

3 Greeting It's always better to personalise an email. It is a good idea to add the first name of the recipient in the greeting. With iSmart Bulletin, you don't need to enter the first name of every single recipient, there's a function that automatically does it. You simply have to first add it into User Manager, iSmart's contact list tool.

4-5 Content With our products, the emails you build are HTML-based. This allows you to add images, tables and more. Make sure the content looks nice by choosing an appropriate font size. Avoid large text sizes. It surely attracts the reader's eye but also quickly becomes annoying. You should also insert a few links within the content, leading to specific pages of your website or even to other websites you may recommend. Make sure it's neat and clear so it can be read easily. If you can, add a few images to make the content a bit more attractive, especially if the email is relatively long. A call to action is also an essential element. Try to involve the recipient. In the case of a multi-page enewsletter, try to make the content diverse enough so anyone can find something interesting to read. You can talk about your business, your industry, your employees, your partners, or even about something that has no direct link with your activities.

6 Bottom At the bottom, you may add your contact details, as well as some links leading to the home page of your website, or any other specific page. Don't hesitate to add the full street address of your business. People tend to trust businesses that don't hesitate to show their street address more than those that don't. In the case of an enewsletter, make sure you put an opt-out option at the bottom, so recipients who don't wish to receive the enewsletter anymore can simply do so within seconds. It is normal to have people unsubscribing, but too many is not normal. If you notice that too many people unsubscribe to your enewsletter, you may want to reconsider your target audience and review the overall quality of the content.