Advice to businesses that have e-newsletters / alerts

In no particular order

1. Make the instructions for subscribing to your newsletter / alerts very easy to find on your website, perhaps link to it from more than one page.

2. Don’t make it onerous for people to sign up – all that’s required is an email address.
You don’t need any other details to send someone an email. If you want to capture other information by all means ask for it but don’t make the subscription to your newsletter contingent on me filling in unnecessary personal details. I’ve not signed up to the mailing list of the Make Lounge in Islington for this reason, despite the fact that I think they’re fab and want to do courses with them.

3. Include with every e-newsletter the following:

(a) a link to your website
(b) a link for the recipient to unsubscribe (most do this anyway)
(c) a link or instructions for others to subscribe* – encourage recipients to forward the newsletter to friends
(d) a telephone number is quite a bonus but not essential

* Here’s what I’ve previously said about newsletters that don’t do 3c:
“If anyone is producing a newsletter please remember to include joining instructions (for the benefit of anyone receiving a forwarded copy – yes, this does happen). Anyone who says “but if you’re reading our newsletter you’ve already signed up” can shackle themselves to a wall while I prepare the implements ;-)”

My major pet peeves are (a) – Thames Clippers generally fail to include this – their alerts tell you which boat isn’t working but not how to zip quickly to their website to find out when the next one is running and (c) – most newsletters I’ve come across don’t do this, unless they’ve already received an email from me suggesting that they do.

Both elude me. Why on earth wouldn’t you want to embed within your promotional literature the instructions for its dissemination? You wouldn’t get that sort of nonsense from DNA (as in the well-known self-copying nucleic acid).