There are some excellent websites that allow you to create newsletters and more importantly manage a list of subscribers, but here is a good tip that you should follow starting out, and do regularly to maintain a professional look to your newsletter:
Test your newsletter with different email providers and in different browsers.
You can do a search for “popular email providers” to get a short list of email accounts to sign up for. I recommend testing your newsletter in 4-5 free email accounts, and Microsoft Outlook. The more you test in (and can compare side by side) the better.
If you do not have any personal accounts for any of the free email providers, then create new accounts for your church (I recommend using the same word or phrase before the @ symbol, example: churchname @ dotcom). You do not need to advertise or use them unless you want to. At this point they are just for testing purposes.
My method is to open all email accounts in one web browser like Internet Explorer, for example. Send a test email to all of them and then view them side by side to see how they look. Remember, there are many variables that determine how people see your newsletter. The web browser, email provider, screen size, and operating system all affect the look of your newsletter in varying degrees.
You can also search for “standard monitor size 2010″ (replace the year to stay current) to give you an idea. Knowing the average monitor size is helpful, but mostly for designing websites. However, have a broader understanding of the average user experience will keep you from falling into the trap of assuming that, “if it looks good on my computer it must be good.”
The most important way to test user experience is to download different web browsers for testing the look of your newsletter (also highly recommended for testing websites). Do a search for “web browsers market share 2010″ and you will see that Internet Explorer, Mozilla Firefox, Google Chrome, and Opera cover 98% of the Internet surfing world. You will want any newsletter or website to be functional in all of these.
Finally, you will want to test emails in Microsoft Outlook. Many people use Outlook, but Outlook formats email differently than other providers, negatively affecting how emails are displayed.
An example of how all this can benefit you:
I recently tested a new email campaign from MailChimp with a new template. Having already setup different email accounts I logged in to a few of them in Google Chrome and Internet Explorer. Things were looking great until I opened it in Microsoft Outlook.
I had uploaded two images and then shrunk them using MailChimp’s on-board newsletter builder. They were supposed be icon-sized links to YouTube and Google Calendar (I wanted to promote a recent video and the launch of a new public calendar). When I opened the email in Outlook the images were their original 450×450 pixel size instead of 16×16. They completely overcrowded the rest of the email. I corrected the problem by uploading pre-shrunk icons of the images I wanted to my MailChimp database and the problem did not repeat itself in Outlook again.
I hope that this information has been helpful. If you need any assistance setting up your next email campaign, please send an email to contact (at) rootedupdotcom.
