Social media and email marketing are two of the digital content marketer’s most powerful weapons. Like the sword and shield to a knight, or a gun and lasso to a cowboy, social sharing buttons and optimized email messages help define the image of the modern digital marketer. Similarly, for Drupal marketers, our user accounts are the crest to our knight’s shield, or the buckle on our cowboy’s belt; a distinctive mark by which we shall be known and remembered. So, why not combine these powers by making including social sharing buttons and a Drupal user account link in the signature line of every email you send?

Email newsletters live and die by the quality of their subscription list. Growing a healthy list can be a long process, but when executed properly, should provide a steady stream of contacts to help business and marketing objectives. Following are a series of techniques, tips and strategies to help you get the most out of your email newsletter subscription process:

It is a marketer’s worst nightmare - you work really hard to set up an email marketing program and finally send it out only to get no response. Confused and agitated, you contact some recipients only to discover that your message has been cast off to the spam folder, forever lost in email marketing’s equivalent of Siberia. How did this happen, and what can you do to prevent it from happening again?

Testing is the number one way to avoid errors, ensure a uniform email appearance, and create the ideal environment for increasing open rates. Testing is a vitally important, but often overlooked, step in email newsletter marketing.

A regularly distributed newsletter should have a memorable name that sticks with the reader, since it will establish your business’ presence in their inbox (and mind) every so often. A name that can be remembered will be more useful toward building brand loyalty, which is always beneficial for your business. Here are some tips for the best practices of naming an inbox.

Measuring all of your marketing metrics is crucial to building and replicating successful campaigns. These measurements extend to email marketing, too. Measuring your online newsletter is easy with a marketing automation platform; otherwise, it can be a bit of a challenge. Regardless, when designing and implementing your email marketing campaign, here are a few key metrics that our email marketing experts recommend always including:

Having a bad newsletter can seriously damage your brand's image. Aside from your products and services, your daily or weekly newsletter is one of the most visible methods people have of interacting with your brand. This article provides do's and don'ts to keep in mind when designing an email newsletter.

When creating a newsletter campaign, it’s very important to think about subject lines--they can determine whether someone opens up an email or not, which is key in generating more leads for your business, and why you should set time aside for subject line planing for each one of your emails.

In this podcast, Volacci's marketing experts Erik Wagner and Chris Gaffney discuss collaborative content creation and project management. While using the real-life example of their popular Newsletter Best Practices 2013: Email Marketing eBook, the two offer a series of tips and strategies to help marketers spread the success and responsibilities of high quality content creation among members of a marketing team.

Putting together a newsletter can be daunting task, as it may seem like there's nowhere to turn for advice on how to make a newsletter. That's why the team at Volacci put together a great Newsletter Best Practices eBook to help you with your email marketing solutions. Over the next few weeks, my colleagues and I will be touching on a few main points from the eBook. Today, I'm going to discuss why it is that it's so important for you to have a newsletter.