ONLINE NEWSLETTERS
When it comes to "HTML (hyper text markup language) Newsletters," the email newsletter for "Mr. Roger's Neighborhood" has been touted as a prime example of an extremely well-done, "advanced" newsletter. You can see it at: http://www.fci.org/newsletter/
Here are some comments about this site:
Remember that clicking on a link to view the newsletter as a website is a different experience than receiving the e-mail as an HTML newsletter. Newsletters can have a different look depending on the e-mail program used (HTML or plain text). While the three columns appear fine on the Mr. Roger’s Neighborhood News website, they could look very different in an e-mail program.
This newsletter does not appear to use alt text with the images. Why is this important? Doing so would:
- Make it useful for visually impaired people reading it with a screen reader and
- Allow use of alt text to know images where available if blocked by the Internet Service Provider (ISP).
Click here to read more incidentaly commentary about online newsletters>.
COMMENTS ABOUT EMAIL SERVICES
"Constant Contact is great. It is easy to use and the feedback you get in the reporting is very helpful in crafting future communication pieces - you know which links were clicked, which recipients opened your email and when, etc. The only downside, and this is not unique to CC is that you end up with a mailing list loaded in your CC account that you have to maintain separately from any other donor or member database you might have. There are import and export features built into CC, but it does require you to stay on top of two or more sources of data.¨
"Constant Contact is good and a good price! The drawbacks however are that it is so easy to sign up and get going with it that I believe they may have had some spammers misuse it as I've found that messages sent through Constant Contact have a higher bounce rate than messages sent with e-mail vendors that work only with nonprofit orgs. A couple of domains seem to block it entirely. Also if you are looking for something for a nonprofit to use and want to do e-fundraising as well as e-marketing, you would have better tracking capability by choosing a vendor that has an integrated solution and does both e-mail marketing and online fundraising as that way you can track results better than if you have one vendor for e-mail and one for donation processing.
Click here to read more about Email Services.
