| Home |
| About Us |
| Services |
| News & Events |
| Newsletter |
| Office |
| Articles |
| Contact Us |
Compton Communications"An Internet Communications Agency"
|
Articles
Five best practices for e-newslettersPosted Sunday, March 23, 2003 1.Use Permission Marketing Most (77%) of email users delete junk mail without ever opening it. Seth Godin in his book, Permission Marketing, stresses the importance of gaining the customers permission and understanding. You do that by building “relationship” with a customer or client.. Especially important is the newsletter in building relationship as you try to move people from prospect to user to fan. Gaining their permission (valid email address) is the first step in overcoming their blatant mistrust of anything electronic and for a e-newsletter most will give their email address based simply upon promising not to abuse of misuse it. Sixty-five percent of people will give you their email address based on a simple promise that it will be used as intended and not shared with third parties according to Emarketer. A best practice is to set up a policy on use of email addresses and customer data and make it visible on the Web site where readers sign up. 2. Use good list management software to keep list clean. List management software is crucial to e-newsletters. The software should allow ease in signing up or canceling an e-newsletter. List manager software also controls personalization, profiling, and provides vital control of bounce handling. Bounce management helps you identify when e-newsletters are not being delivered and why. Good list management software should tell you why a bounce occurred and allow you to take action to either delete the email account or to reintegrate it to the list. Old listserv software used to wait for three bounces before starting a probe of the address or removing the email address. Newer software should give you tools to show what emails what not delivered and why and allow you to reset or delete accordingly. Good software will allow you to add more elements to the reader profile and to aid in building new lists when e-newsletters topics change or are divided. 3. Welcome new e-newsletter subscribers with a welcome letter Welcome letters are based on the old listserv requirement of telling new subscribers the rules and how to unsubscribe. For e-newsletters readers, the welcome letter should market your publication and give new users an idea of the content they can expect to see in future issues. Just like listservs, the welcome letter should contain instruction on how to update their profile data, how to unsubscribe and how to contact the e-newsletter staff. See our article last month on Welcome Letters . 4. Personality and style should relate to the readers. Newsletters have long been a way for relating information in a less formal and direct way and e-newsletters are no different. Michael Katz in his e-newsletter, E-newsletter on Enewsletters March 21 edition tells the story of why bees pollinate flowers…they do it for the honey… not because they feel it is their job to visit all these flowers. His article is a humorous piece, but it aptly points out that readers are looking for the honey in your content. If there are no flowers, they won’t be back. Personality and style (see my article about style Setting an E-newsletter style . Style is about using more formal tone or picking a tone that is appropriate for your audience. Articles should be written not to the exacting standards of your college journalism professor but more appropriately to the level of your readers. This may require running a fog index periodically in Word to check your reading level. 5. Deliver the right format e-newsletter. Notice I said deliver. Portable Document File linked to a Web page is not delivery. It would be the same as your paperboy calling you up in the morning to tell you what bush he hit the paper in. The same applies to making a online newsletter Web page and sending an email to tell readers where it is on your web site. Delivery is sending a Text or HTML formatted email to the subscriber. Right format means the format that your reader prefers. This may require you to have a check box on the signup for either text or HTML and let them choose. ClickZ study in July 2002 showed that although roughly 90 percent of readers had HTML capable email systems, 32 percent preferred text e-newsletters. Links: Enewsletters on Enewsletters - March 21,2003 Setting an E-newsletter style Welcome Letters |