Make Your Email Newsletter Easy to Open and Read

In my life, I try to focus on the positive. You know...concentrate on what I want instead of what I don't want. It seems like, lately in this blog, I've been focusing on negative things...things you shouldn't do instead of things you should do. Frankly, that's because lately I've seen email marketers doing a lot of simple things wrong. Here's another one: When you send out email newsletters, focus on the contents instead of the container. I just received a newsletter that came as a PDF attachment to an email. I read most of my email on my phone. PDF readers on phones are clunky at best and, for all practical purposes, unusable. That meant I had to get to my computer to open it up (yawn) and read it. In today's world, most people are not concerned with pretty graphics and layout; they're interested in what you have to say. In other words, they're a lot more interested in the contents of your message than in the container that delivers it. If you feel that you must produce a fancy, graphics-intensive newsletter, knock yourself out, but please include a plain ol' text version (not an attachment) for those of us (an increasingly large number) who want to read it on the run...or risk losing us as subscribers.