Does Your Newsletter Standout in a Crowd?
As e-newsletters become a more common method of reaching out to customers and clients, the quantity of newsletters filling the email boxes of your own customers is starting to increase. This makes the quality of the newsletter you deliver even more important than ever before.

Make your newsletter standout above the crowd and make it engaging and focused on your customer’s interests so that they look forward to reading it each month. Your newsletter service provider should be your partner in this endeavor. Think about all the things you do to make and distribute a newsletter and then ask your provider how they help to make all those things easier to do.
 
A Good Newsletter has Great Content!
At the core, a newsletter must deliver well-written and informative information in a concise format. This is how your subscribers will rate your newsletter and it will determine if they will read it again the next time. Because the creation of good material is the hardest part of the process, make sure your newsletter service provider provides the tools and resources needed to manage, create, license, and obtain high-quality content. And, if content is available, how much work does it take to get it formatted correctly for your publication?
 
Personalize and Focus Your Efforts
The success of your newsletter in the long term will be determined by its ability to retain existing customers and convert prospects into new customers. To do this effectively, you should seek to address your subscribers personally and provide content that matches closely to their interests. A personal greeting (e.g., Dear Bob) grabs their attention and timely, well-written articles keeps it.
 
A Checklist for Choosing The Best Solution
There are many elements to running a successful newsletter program. When evaluating providers it is useful to compare them based on the features they offer and how well they integrate these features together to address the full life cycle of newsletter publishing. Use the checklist below as a starting point for your evaluation.
 

Feature	YES/NO
Dynamic Content
Content Manager
Subscription Management
Online List Manipulation
Bounce Management
Opt-out Protection
Accepts Flash Content
Attachments
WYSIWYG Layout Editor
Companion Web Site
Custom Domains
Issue Archive
Surveys
Letters to the Editor
Printer-Friendly Version
Reader Tracking Report
Popular Articles Report
Download Reports in Excel Format
Personalized Messages
Content Syndication
Content Library
FREE Articles
Multi-user Collaboration
Upload from Word
AOL 5.0 thru 7.0 Detection