A year ago push technology was all the rage. Today it's a faded
memory except in certain corporate pockets. But
e-mail
newsletters, the poor-man's push technology, are thriving.
Email Newsletter helps you in Building your business
If you're serious about Web marketing, you ought to look long and
hard at beginning a newsletter for your own business. Let me outline
some of the reasons:
Conserving contacts. How many people have visited your site since
it first opened it URL for business? 500? 1,500? 10,000? 100,000?
1,000,000? How many of those could you get in touch with today if
you wanted to? If you don't have some way to communicate with
visitors, you've let them slip through your fingers. What a waste!
Out of site, out of mind. Once someone has left your site -- even
if they bookmark your URL -- they're likely to forget about you.
That's where a newsletter comes in. It regularly brings your
business to the front of their mind. Every time they hear from you,
the chances increase that they'll remember to come back to your
site.
Building trust. My grandfather had the knack of striking up a
conversation with nearly everyone he met, and over the years those
same people would come back to him for their insurance and real
estate needs. Your voice and manner in a newsletter becomes familiar
to your customers. Your ongoing conversations built trust, and trust
is at the heart of doing business on the Web. When your e-mail
newsletter offers readers something of value time after time, you
and your business become like a trusted friend.
Establishing a reputation or a brand. Closely related to trust is
a reputation for excellence. When you're trying to choose between a
brand name and the "identical" store brand, which do you
trust more? The brand name. Their advertising has been building a
reputation in your mind for years. Is the product any better than
the store brand? Perhaps not, but it has a reputation for quality in
your mind. Is the businessperson who publishes a newsletter more
competent than a less vocal expert? Perhaps not, but she's built a
reputation for specialized knowledge in the minds of her readers by
providing that knowledge. That's what sets her publication
apart from junk mail.
Promoting products and services. A newsletter also helps you to
tell subscribers about your products and services. So long as you're
offering them information of value in your newsletter, they'll take
a look at what you have to sell. When you have a special sale or
promotion, the newsletter gives you a ready vehicle to let your very
best prospects know about it.
Selling advertising. Eventually, your newsletter may do well
enough that others will want to advertise in it. When you get above
5,000 or 10,000 subscribers, advertisers begin to take interest, and
could contribute a modest sum to offset costs of your newsletter
(though don't plan on this as a major revenue stream for the first
couple of years).
What's involved in beginning a newsletter for your business? First
and foremost is a commitment to publish it with regularity and
excellence. If you can't make that commitment, don't begin. The next
step is harvesting e-mail addresses.
Now don't misunderstand the harvest metaphor. I'm not talking
about sucking up millions of e-mail addresses with some giant
spam-blaster machine. I'm talking about patiently collecting the
e-mail addresses of those who come to your site.
The simplest way to collect the e-mail address is to invite people
to subscribe to your newsletter by typing their e-mail address into
a simple form and pressing the submit button. And simplest may be
best. Should you ask for their name, address, phone, fax, mother's
maiden name, and favorite ice cream flavor? No. Of course, it's
tempting. But if you require them to, you'll get many fewer
subscriptions. The purpose here is not to build a database of
prospects, it is to build a long-term relationship with prospects so
that you become their preferred vendor. Don't confuse the two.
I suggest making your privacy policy clear. State what you will
and will not do with the information you collect. Protect their
privacy, but make every effort to get them to sign up for your
newsletter; we place a subscription form on nearly every page of our
site.
You'll want to store the e-mail addresses in a handy form. The
best way, of course, is to make the form automatically subscribe the
e-mail address to a newsletter using list software such as Majordomo
(more on that in a sidebar). At the very least, ask your website
developer to help you collect the e-mail addresses in a simple
online database. Cutting and pasting addresses from one e-mail after
another is not my idea of fun.
You'll also want to give people a chance to unsubscribe easily if
a "friend" subscribed them without their knowledge. When a
person subscribes to our newsletter, we immediately send a message
telling him how to unsubscribe if he wants to, assuring him that we
do not want to send any unsolicited mail. Many lists have a two-step
verification process to subscribe. We haven't found that necessary,
and it can be pretty daunting. You're sure to lose some subscribers
who give up trying subscribe.
Keeping your e-mail list accurate isn't easy. You'd be surprised
how many Internet newbies don't know their e-mail address. We've set
up our form so it looks for the appropriate e-mail address format --
initial letters, an @ sign, letters after a period at the end, and
the absence of certain symbols such as \ or / which are more
appropriate to URLs than e-mail addresses. If the visitor enters an
obviously incorrect e-mail address, the program gently informs him
of his error and asks him to correct it. This saves a lot of trouble
unsubscribing incorrect addresses later.
Writing the Newsletter
Pompous doesn't work very well on the Web. I've had to unlearn a
lot of what my English teachers taught me about formal sentences. If
you can learn to write like you talk, you'll find that people
actually enjoy reading it. Make your newsletter chatty and informal.
But chatty doesn't mean airy. You need to say something worth
saying. You job is to add value to your readers' lives, not
frustrate them until they ask, "Where's the beef?"
What kind of content should you offer? A lot of this depends upon
your industry. What do your readers want to know? If you have a
computer games store, you'll want to offer cheat codes. You'll talk
about graphics, and describe new products. What major trends are
affecting the industry? Examine those. You could offer links to
sites that provide more information.
Many newsletters include briefs on the latest news in the field.
Be careful, however, not to just snip out someone else's story and
place it in your newsletter without permission. That's immoral and
illegal, not to mention tacky. Always ask so you don't make enemies
or expose your business to a copyright infringement suit.
How-to articles are always popular. I spent several years engaged
in biochemical research at the Cal Tech in Pasadena, California.
While I was a lowly research assistant, I would work alongside
tireless grad students and post-doctoral fellows who our professor
would refer to as "the local world's authority on…"
and name their specialty. If you think about it, you're probably the
local world's authority on something, at least your readers will
think so if you explain the fine points to them in an article.
Don't feel you have to write all the articles yourself. Ask others
in your field to write an occasional article, or ask for permission
to reprint something they have written. Perhaps one of your
employees is an especially gifted writer. Use her talents.
By this time you're probably getting an idea of just how much work
a newsletter can be. I find it usually takes me a couple of days
working hard to get a newsletter out. Though the out-of-pocket costs
are low, the time investment is substantial. I look at this as a
marketing cost, and discipline myself to do it faithfully. I never
have "time to do it," so I make time. It helps to look at
the rewards. As you publish your newsletter regularly, you'll be
establishing stronger ties with your customers, which will in turn
build your online business substantially over a period of time.
How often should you publish a newsletter? Quarterly is a good
goal at first. Get out a calendar and mark the days you plan to send
out your newsletter, and then block out a couple of days prior to
the deadline to prepare each newsletter. As you learn how to produce
a newsletter, increase the frequency. I used to be amused that
Mecklermedia's Web Week (now Internet World) came
out every three weeks at first. Then it was every other week. Then
every week. They started as their resources allowed and worked
gradually to their goal.
Sending It Out
While your e-mail program may be able to send HTML-enhanced
messages, I wouldn't be too quick to adopt high tech just yet. Many
e-mail programs (including mine) can't read HTML.
Instead use plain ASCII text. I recommend setting your word
processor for 65-character lines (e.g., 5-1/2 inches for 10 point
Courier New font). When you've gone over the text with a finetooth
comb, then "save as" "text only with line breaks"
(that's Microsoft Word's terminology). This will protect your
newsletter from that notorious ragged look when your subscribers
read it on their e-mail program.
I'm always careful to use the "search and replace"
function to delete the space before every line break so that
Majordomo doesn't interpret it as =20. I turn off "smart quotes"
on my word processor, since they often produce unintended (and
unreadable) results when sent out by e-mail or translated into HTML.
Before you publish, make sure you've updated your website to
include any features you've highlighted in your newsletter, because
soon you'll have numbers of repeat visitors hitting your site.
Now send out your newsletter to your subscribers using whatever e-mail
list program you've chosen. It's normal to get a lot of "delivery
failure" messages after a mailing. We find that every month about
5% of our subscribers are no longer found at their old e-mail address.
Part of publishing a newsletter is the tedium of removing obsolete
e-mail addresses.
Should you display a copy of your newsletter on your website? By
all means, especially if it includes content of enduring value. Your
visitors will be able to learn more when they browse. And the more
Web pages on your site, the higher the chance that someone will find
you through an AltaVista search. Create a separate subdirectory on
your site for each year or volume of issues when you begin,
or your current directory will soon be bursting with newsletters.
Out here in California we're celebrating the 150th anniversary of
the discovery of gold. A prospector would wash the gravel, panning
it carefully, until he refined it down to black sand and, hopefully,
some gold flakes at the bottom of the pan. These he would carefully
pick out the gold with tweezers and place in a leather pouch.
Setting up an e-mail newsletter is a way of making a pouch to
conserve website visitors so they'll return another day. And then
the analogy of gold may not be far off target.
By
Netmaxims Solutions
