Cape Town Holiday Villas is a high end holiday villa & apartment rental company that has been using GraphicMail for three years to communicate special offers and promotions to our customer base. Over this time we have gained a lot of experience on how to create powerful promotional email newsletters for well-to-do customers. Our latest mailer, which was distributed during April 2011, has been our most successful; with an astounding 17% open rate and 26% click-through rate - which leads us to believe that we have reached a notable milestone in refining our approach to email newsletter marketing.

Here are our Top Ten HTML Newsletter learnings to date:

1)    Email newsletters with photographs embedded perform better. Make sure that you scale down the picture's disk size (in kb) to reduce the size of the newsletter. The smaller the newsletter, the less email credits you will need to spend.

2)    Address your newsletter to an individual. We sent out several mails to “Dear Traveller”, and found that personalization is received a lot better by our audience.

3)    Use a compelling subject line. Don’t be afraid to clearly state your offer right off the bat, but be realistic and make sure you follow through and deliver on your promises.

4)    Always include your telephone number on the mailer in case someone wants to call you directly. They should be able to find your number easily without having to navigate back to your website.

5)    Send your email from a personal email address not an info/enquiry@ account. It adds a personal touch. Nobody likes to feel as though they are speaking to an android.

6)    I like sending emails before the weekend. We sell a leisure product and people need to be in the right mental space to really pay attention to what we have to say. Not surprisingly, we have found that we get more enquiries over the weekends.

7)    Use testimonials in your email newsletters. I know this is a little old-hat, but it does give the mailer a lot more dignity. Readers like the reassurance of previous customers and reviewers.

8)    Make sure your newsletter design is professional. Shoddy work will harm your brand. So why not start off by choosing one of GraphicMail's free html newletter templates?

9)    It’s obvious, but service your responses promptly. You can even make use of an auto-responder if you are performing a send over the weekend to notify clients that you are aware of them. The longer you wait, the more they will shop around.

10)    Buy credits in bulk. You will use them eventually and it will work out a lot cheaper in the long run.

In conclusion, I really like using GraphicMail as it is constantly improving and new powerful features are regularly added, the latest being additional social media features and mobile marketing tools. This is the most comprehensive and suitable email marketing service for any business scale I have ever utilized.

Alexander Smith, Google Professional

www.Networds.co.za

Cape Town Holiday Villas