So You Want To Send an E-Newsletter

Email newsletters are an enormously cost-effective way to stay in touch with and grow your audience. Periodic emails - with news, events, or tips - remind your constituents of your existence, of the good things you are doing, and of the ways that you might be able to work together. And best yet, they're quite inexpensive – obviously, you'll need to put aside staff time to write the e-newsletter and track its success, but there are few necessary infrastructure costs.

There are a number of free or inexpensive tools that can help you to manage your subscriber list, create and sent the e-newsletters, and track the number of people who open the emails or click on the links. In this article, we'll look at the questions you should ask in choosing a tool, take a tour through the types of tools available, and discuss some specific products.

We won't talk much about what you should write in your newsletter, the format of the emails, or the strategy behind it – that's another article. However, these things are of critical importance. Clearly, an easily read and keenly useful monthly e-newsletter is likely to have better results for a nonprofit than an irrelevant and sporadic brain dump that takes effort even to view. A few things to keep in mind as you think through your specific e-news strategy:

• An e-newsletter doesn't stand alone. Like any external communications, your e-newsletter should be part of an overall strategy, which encompasses print communications, PR, and your website.

• Content is king. Consider what to include and how to present it with just as much care as for a printed newsletter. Make sure your information is timely and relevant to your subscribers.

• Brevity is key. Few people will read all the way through a long email. Typically, an e-newsletter includes only short “teasers” to stories featured on your website. Event with these teasers, cut down the text to about half of the words you would use in a printed document, and use headers and bullet lists to make it easy to scan.

• Format matters. Think carefully about whether to send your e-newsletter in an HTML format (which allows graphics, complex formatting, and sophisticated reporting, but may be difficult for some your subscribers to view), or in a plain text format (which limits the formatting, but ensures that all will be able to read it).
• Timing matters. The day and time that you send your e-newsletter can make a notable difference in the number of people who read it. Across all industries, Tuesday morning is considered to be a prime time, but this varies substantially based on organizational specifics. Be consistent, so that your subscribers know when to expect your email.

For more information about ensuring strategic e-newsletters, see the For More Information section at the end of this article.

At the end of the day, sending an e-newsletter is technically just like sending any other email. So why couldn't you just put all the email addresses onto the BCC line and send out an email just like any other? Well, you can. This will absolutely work. It just may not be your best option, for a number of reasons:

• Time involved in maintaining your subscriber list. There's a lot of effort involved in adding new subscribers, removing people who want to be un-subscribed, and monitoring emails that are returned. And remember that you are legally liable for removing those people who request it. E-news tools can handle these issues for you.
• Integrating your list with your website. Many email tools provide ways to put an e-newsletter signup form on your website. This allows your website visitors to easily sign themselves up without directly involving anyone on your staff.
• Potential for being listed as a spammer. If you send out a huge number of emails from your personal email domain (such as @alderconsulting.com) and some people complain that your emails are spam (which a few people are likely to do regardless of how careful you are), your domain could be blacklisted as a spammer. This means that major ISPs (such as AOL or Yahoo) could refuse to deliver any email from you – not just your e-newsletter, but all your organization's day-to-day email. This is not very likely, but if it happens, it could affect your operations for months. Many tools handle the delivery of email for you, so your domain is never involved.
• Enhanced access to ISPs. On the flip side, some email tools have relationships with major ISPs that ensure that your email will go through when it might otherwise be caught as spam (based on keywords and the like).

What to Look For in an E-News Tool

E-newsletter tools come in a lot of different shapes and sizes. There are fairly inexpensive, stripped down tools, more expensive fully featured tools, and tools geared towards different needs and objectives. As you look at the (fairly lengthy) list of considerations below, you will like find a number of them simply not applicable to your organization.

• Setup and monthly fees. Most of the tools described below are priced as an Application Service Provider (ASP) – essentially, you rent them by the month. Tools come in a huge range of prices – from free to hundreds of dollars a month. Make sure you understand what, if anything, you will pay up front as a setup fee, and what you will pay on a monthly or yearly basis.
• Maximum number of emails, subscribers, and/or lists. For most tools, you buy a package that includes either a maximum number of emails per month, or a maximum number of list subscribers. Most tools will also let you manage multiple lists at the same time.
• Website integration. Many tools provide a chunk of HTML code that, when placed on your website, allows visitors to subscribe themselves. Check if you can capture custom information about your visitors (their relationship to your organization, for instance), and if these custom fields can be shown drop-down boxes (as opposed to free-text fields, which are not very useful for statistics or segmenting the list). Also check whether the tool will support more than one linked website form. Our preferred e-news signup method – which only a few tools support - is to ask only for an email address to subscribe, but then to request additional optional information in a follow-up form once they've signed up.
• Subscriber import, export, and integration. Ensure that you can easily load in lists of new subscribers, or export the subscribers you have, to allow you to synch up subscribers with an offline contact management database. Most tools allow this. There are a few tools that also provide more support to integrate e-newsletter lists with donor or other support lists.
• HTML email support.  If you would like to create HTML emails (which allows graphics, complex formatting, and sophisticated reporting, but may be difficult for some your subscribers to view), make sure the tool you choose supports this. A tool that includes HTML templates or editing capabilities can be helpful if you don't have HTML expertise. Note that you don't necessarily need them - you can create HTML emails using separate HTML editing tools, such as Contribute or DreamWeaver.

• Personalization and Segmentation. If you're hoping for a more personalized approach, look for a tool that allows you to include personalized fields (i.e. “Dear Laura”) in your emails. Higher end tools will also allow you to send different emails to different subscribers based on their information (state, interest, etc) or even on their response to previous emails.

• Message preview and testing. Check to make sure that you can easily see how your emails will look with a preview functionality, an ability to send a test email, or both. Testing is critical, particularly if you're sending HTML emails.
• Ease of use. Get a look at the administrative interface that you'll use to create emails and view reports – some of the tools on the market are bafflingly difficult to figure out.
• Email “From” line. Who does the email appear to be from when subscribers receive it? Where does a reply go if a subscriber replies to your email? Many tools allow you to simply enter a name and email address to appear as the “From” information.
• Ensuring email delivery. A solid e-newsletter tool will help get your emails into inboxes and out of spam filters. Top tools have a strict anti-spam policy and create relationships with major ISPs (i.e. AOL, Hotmail) to “whitelist” your e-newsletters – preventing them from ever being tagged as spam. Some tools let you do a “spam keyword” check before sending – to score your email on the likelihood that other automated tools will think its spam. This is a handy way to learn what makes an email look like spam.
• Bounces and unsubscribes. Check what the process is for handling bounces (when an email is returned as undeliverable) and for unsubscribes. Some tools handle all of this automatically, some require you to be involved in the process, and some allow you to choose how involved you would like to be.
• Reporting. All tools should be able to show you how many subscribers you have, and how the number has changed over time. If you are sending HTML emails, some of the higher end tools also offer extremely useful reports as to how many opened the email, and how many clicked on each link in the e-newsletter.
• Support. As with any tool, check how responsive the vendor is to your questions and what methods you can use to reach them. Do they list a phone number, or is support only by email? How comprehensive is the documentation?
• Reputation and longevity of vendor. Make sure the company seems stable. As with any other online vendor, you will have to go through the setup process all over again if they go out of business. And ensure that the email addresses on your list will belong solely to you. No reputable vendor would send emails to your list for any reason.

Tools to Support an E-Newsletter

There are a number of different ways to support an e-newsletter. Perhaps the web or email hosting company you already use can help you. Or you may be able to use open source tools, or a free ASP discussion list. For most nonprofits, however, an ASP tool specifically designed to manage e-newsletters will work best. Below, we walk through each of these options and give examples of products in each category.

Discussion list tools through your hosting company

If you are hosting your website or email through a large shared hosting company (one of the typical $5-$20/month ones), you may already be paying for tools that can manage your e-newslettter list. Many hosting packages include the functionality to manage several mailing lists. Check your control panel to find out.

The tools typically available are useful but have limited functionality. Generally, people can subscribe and unsubscribe by sending an email to a particular address (i.e. “subscribe_shoestring@alderconsulting.com). The list administrator can subscribe people by hand through a web-based interface, and can view and monitor the addresses on the list. To send out an e-newsletter, the administrator sends an email (plain text or HTML) to a particular address; the email is then sent on to everyone on the list. The tool also manages bounced emails as needed.

These tools tend to be focused on discussion lists, in which multiple people talk to each other via the list, rather than e-newsletters. The functionality they have works fine for e-newsletters (you can simply moderate out anyone who tries to post something else to the list), but they don't have much of the advanced functionality offered by e-news specific tools. There's usually no ability to directly integrate the tools with your website, to track detailed subscriber information, to preview or test emails, or to view reports. And keep in mind that the e-newsletter is sent from your own email domain, so there's still the danger of being listed as a spammer discussed in the Why Not Just Use Outlook section.

This is a reasonable, low-cost solution for small lists when budget is a priority. It is one step above Outlook in helping you to manage your list, but it doesn't offer much of the functionality of more substantial e-newsletter solutions.

Discussion list ASP tools

If you can't get a discussion list tool through your hosting company, a number of services will let you use theirs – either free for qualified organizations, free with ads, or for a fee. These services generally work like those described above, except with someone else's email domain. On the upside, this means that that there is no danger of being blacklisted as a spammer. On the downside, subscribers will see the service as a key part of the “From” email address (i.e. shoestring@topica.com). Some of these services do not allow HTML e-newsletters.

Again, these are low-costs solutions for small organizations. They have a slight advantage over discussion tools with your own hosting company, as there is no danger of having your domain blacklisted. However, there are still many useful e-newsletter functionalities they don't offer.

Some tools of this type to consider:

• Online Policy Group (www.onlinepolicy.org/services.shtml): The OPG is a nonprofit organization which offers free lists to “"nonprofit organizations and individuals who are under-represented, underserved, or facing unfair bias, discrimination, or defamation".
• Riseup (http://lists.riseup.net) : A “radical tech group” that offers free lists that “must be used for radical social change.”
• Topica (http://lists.topica.com): Discussion lists which are free to anyone, with small text ads shown at the top of each email.
• Yahoo Groups (www.yahoogroups.com): Similar to Topica, Yahoo offers free discussion lists to anyone, with ads in each email.
• Electric Embers (www.electricembers.org ): A nonprofit that offers affordable fee-based discussion lists. Fees are on a sliding scale, starting at about $5/ month. Electric Embers is one of the only tools in this article who will work with organizations to integrate the subscriber list with an existing database (for notable extra cost).

Please note that if you specifically need a discussion list as opposed to an e-newsletter, there are a number of more expensive tools that provide more advanced discussion list specific functionalities (i.e. DiscussionPro, Listserve.com, etc). But that's a different article.

E-newsletter ASP tools

E-news ASPs make a lot of strategic sense for most organizations. While they are a bit more expensive than tools in other areas, they offer many useful functionalities geared to e-newsletters in particular.

Like the discussion tools mentioned above, these tools have a web-based administrative interface to mange subscribers. For these tools, though, you also create and send your emails through a web-based interface. You enter the text or HTML for your email, along with information about what subscribers you would like to send it to, into forms at a particular website, and the tool sends the emails for you. All of the tools mentioned below, unless mentioned otherwise, allow you to:

• Integrate your list with your website, given a basic knowledge of HTML
• Easily import and export subscriber lists
• Create HTML emails without HTML knowledge
• Insert personalized mail merge fields
• Preview and test your emails
• Tailor the “From” line to match your organization
• Report on subscribers and response information for each e-newsletter
• Automatically manage bounces and unsubscribes

These tools remove all possibility of being blacklisted as spammer. In addition, many of the vendors proactively manage relationships with ISPs to prevent spam filter problems that might trouble you with other solutions.

If your organization is willing to put a couple hundred dollars per year into infrastructure for a strategic e-newsletter effort, this is the category for you.

Some tools of this type to consider:

• GraphicMail (graphicmail.com): In a deal that can't be beat, GraphicMail offers 10,000 emails a year free to nonprofits (notable branding for GraphicMail is included in your emails in the free version; the branding can be removed for $20/year). The tool is impressive to boot – it has a great HTML editor that allows you to create your own templates. (Thanks to Amy Fischer for this great referral!)
• Vertical Response (www.verticalresponse.com): Vertical Response is mostly differentiated by its pricing scheme – it is priced by the number of emails sent. At $1.50 per hundred emails, it can be quite affordable for small lists.
• Intellicontact (www.intellicontact.com): Intellicontact is also friendly for small lists, at $9/ month for 500 subscribers and $12/ month for 1000. It has a great HTML email editor – not only can you create emails based on their pre-packaged templates (as is typical), but you can create your own templates. This would allow an HTML savvy staff member or consultant to create sophisticated to be used by their less HTML savvy colleagues.
• Groundspring EmailNow (www.groundspring.org/services/emailnow.cfm): Groundspring, a nonprofit itself, has a reliable set of tools that includes a basic e-newsletter tool for $20/ month ($49 setup fee). EmailNow can be integrated with Groundspring's donation tool, DonateNow, to provide integrated reporting on – for instance – how much money was raised by each email campaign. It does not, however, provide any tools to help create HTML e-newsletters without HTML knowledge.
• Topica Basic Edition (www.topica.com): Not the free service we all love to hate, but an impressive paid service. Topica offers very sophisticated website integration (with multiple forms and response workflows), essentially unlimited custom fields, and powerful list segmentation tools for $25/month. If you want to know a lot about the people on your list and target separate emails to separate groups, this is a great tool for you.
• Democracy In Action (www.democracyinaction.org): Democracy in Action is a nonprofit that offers a suite of tools directed at those trying to mobilize large groups to action. Their e-newsletter tool is a bit expensive for what it is if purchased by itself ($200 setup and $50/month), but for an additional $50/month ($500 setup, $100/month), you can get a sophisticated integrated package that includes donation support, tools to email and fax politicians in bulk, tools to support meet-ups, website content management tools, and more - an amazing value for $100/month.

There are many tools in this category. Also check out BCentral List Builder, ConstantContact, CoolerEmail, MailerMailer, and Sparklist, among others.

Installable open source tools

If you have the technical skills to install packaged code and databases on your server, then you may find a good bargain in open source e-news tools. You pay a flat fee (about $75 - $150) for the tool, download the code, and install it on your server. The tools are designed to be installed with no special access rights, and work fine in a shared environment. Once they are installed, they are similar to the low-end ASP tools described above.

Keep in mind that the tool sits on your own server, so we're back to a situation in which your domain could be blacklisted as a spammer.

If you're organization is fairly technically savvy, doesn't plan to send many emails, and would rather pay up-front rather than over time, one of these tools may make sense.

Some tools of this type to consider:

• PHPList ( www.phplist.com ) : Probably the most well-known tool in this category. Good basic website integration, subscriber management, HTML email creation tools. Light on reporting tools.
• PHPMail ( www.phpmail.com ): Similar to PHPlist, for about $80 flat software fee. Features are similar, but has nice foreign language support (including non-western character sets) in addition. Light on reporting tools.
• Pilotgroup ( http://newsletter.pilotgroup.net/ ) : Again, functionality is similar to phpmail, with basic website integration, subscriber management, and HTML creation tools, but light on reporting. Flat software fee of about $99.

Other Methods to Support an E-Newsletter

Should that not be enough, there are in fact a number of other ways to go about this. Just a quick word about other methods that may make sense, particularly for larger nonprofits:

• Desktop software: There are a number of software packages that sit on your own computer that can be purchased in the $500 - $1500 range. They deliver your e-newsletter through your own internet connection, and monitor your email to automatically handle bounces and unsubscribes. If you need to integrate your e-newsletter list with a complex existing database, this might be worth looking into, but for most organizations, an ASP will likely be a better choice.

• Server software: If you have your own dedicated server and the skill to install things on it, there are a number of good free open source tools that support discussion lists, such as Sympa and Majordomo. These are the same tools that are behind the discussion tools in the first two categories above.

• Large integrated internet management packages: There are a number of large tools that provide integrated email, donation, content management, and more. These tools -such as Convio, GetActive, and Kintera - are well beyond the shoestring realm at $1000/month or more.

For More Information

Online Email Communication Tools (www.nten.org/conferences-2003-ntc-email)

The materials – including a substantial matrix of e-news tools to which I'm very indebted - from an email list tool session presented at the 2003 National NTEN conference, by Adam Bernstein of Electric Embers.

Email Newsletter Tip Sheet (www.coyotecom.com/enews/enews.html)

Jayne Cravens' old but still very relevant overview of content and strategy for e-newsletters, focusing on text-only as opposed to HTML e-newsletters.

Groundspring Email Strategy Center (www.groundspring.org/learningcenter/email_messaging.cfm)

A number of articles, both by Groundspring and others, about how best to use email to promote your nonprofit.

Why Email is More Important Than Your Website (http://news.gilbert.org/features/featureReader$3608)

Michael Gilbert's elaborations on why "email is more important than your web site" and his three rules of email.