With great content - and a bit of luck - your website should have steady traffic with visitors regularly signing up for a 'freebie' or newsletter. This will produce an opt-in email list that can be used to 'get the word out' about your business. A regular 'email blast' to your list can be used to announce important news about your business or advertise specials or upcoming events. You want your visitors to return to your website often, and this is one way to insure this will happen.

If you are struggling to create and execute an e-mail broadcast for your business, consider a few simple but fundamental rules about e-mail messages that will enhance your response rate.

1. Be selective: Don’t carpet bomb. Make use of e-mail addresses that have a verifiable opt-in status. This will increase response rates by 10 times. Also, using your own opt-in list, or even a targeted list you've purchased, will prevent your site from being 'cited' for spamming.
2. Don’t bore: With the amount of spamming that goes on, you need to give the recipient a solid reason to open your message. Badly constructed subject lines are a sure way to the trash folder. At the same time, don’t use the subject line as a feverish sales pitch. Take a look at emails you've received today and notice the subject lines that grabbed your attention and made you want to know more.
3. Don’t waffle: Your e-mail broadcast is only a means to an end. The desired outcome is establishing contact with your prospect or getting them to visit your website. Remember, a long message has small chance of eliciting a response. Do mention your reason for e-mailing right at the beginning.
4. Make it attractive: Use HTML to create the message, as it looks better on screen and allows the URL's to be hidden behind images. Also develop a text version of the HTML which can be broadcast simultaneously, to ensure that recipients who are unable to accept the latter will still be able to receive your message.
5. Don’t over-design: Ensure that your entire message, including the response mechanism, can be viewed on a single screen. Avoid using different font sizes and typefaces that only confuse and distract readers from the main message. Also make sure that graphics are kept to a minimum or preferably less than 24KB.
6. Make it easy: This is the most important e-mail broadcast rule. Always include a clear and crisp call to action like “Register” or Buy Now” that allows users to access your website easily. These can be set up as a link directly to your website.
7. Follow up: You shouldn’t think of e-mail broadcast as a one time hit - an all or nothing approach. Keep track of everything - unsubscribed clickable-links, e-mail responses, phone calls and faxes received. Also check the status of every click on the website and follow up on the same.

If you would like to have a template for an html email that looks like your homepage, or just uses your logo as we've elected to do, just contact us and we'll be happy to set it up for you.

Typically, we write our Web Tip of the Month from scratch, but often we find something that's easier to reprint or extract some content with the author's permission. Portions of this month's Web Tip comes from an article written by Akhil Shahani. You can visit his website at www.aykya.com.

This Web Tip is provided by Web Design Partners.com. We hope you will also take time to visit our online stores:

Please contact us if you need changes or updates made to your current web site. Your visitors want to see fresh new material and offers each time they visit. This is another, very important way to achieve your Internet Success.

Janet and Phil