Too many publishers are still not doing these simple things to automate their email

The buzz word of the year is most definitely automation. Everyone uses it, in almost every industry. Of course, I can only speak for the email technology industry where automation has reached new heights. Automation features in email are now available to even the smallest of publishers. The cost to automate email newsletters has dropped substantially, leaving no excuse NOT to automate.

Subscriber Preference centers are essential to publishers who send daily. Not only do these preference centers enhance the subscriber’s experience but they also gathers additional subscriber data that is instrumental for automation and monetization. A couple recommendations to include in your preference center:

1. Easy to access email address update box and subscription management tools:http://goldlasso.com/media-publlishers/monetize.html
   
   
   
   
2. Make sure the subscriber can access the preference center from the initial registration page, the opt-out page and via any app or Web account management tools. These days ease and convenience win over all else so don't make your subscriber work hard to find the things they need. 

Scaling your email program, including your monetization efforts is heavily dependent on automating newsletter assembly and dissemination. One of the easiest ways to automate your email is to use an RSS-to-Email campaign. Most ESPs are able to assist with this. If you have an RSS feed on your site that you are consistently updating, use it to your advantage for getting content out to your subscribers. Wordpress and Joomla provide the greatest flexibility to automate email newsletters. Gold Lasso offers a plugin for Wordpress that will allow you to customize your RSS-to-Email template.

Automation is wonderful thing, however, there is still the concern of optimal deliverability and the size of your newsletter. According to tests done by Email on Acid, deliverability issues often start when an email is 100kb + in size. It’s important to keep images as small as possible while still keeping a quality resolution. Your ability to get larger size newsletters to the inbox will likely be based on your sender reputation. Even with a great sender rep, sending large newsletters is not recommended because load times on mobile devices can be significantly higher causing subscriber frustration. You don’t want that. It’s tricky to find the perfect recipe and balance, but once you do, it will pay off. 

Examples and recommendations are fully covered in Gold Lasso’s “The Email Monetization Playbook”. Click here to download this definitive guide for publishers -- offering more than 150 tips for optimizing email monetization with concrete examples, illustrations, and pitfalls to avoid.