You've probably seen them advertised or subscribed to a few. E-zines seem to be sweeping the Internet and filling mailboxes. Maybe you've thought about creating your own for your site, but decided against it for any number of reasons. Maybe you didn't see how e-zine marketing could help. Maybe you decided that maintaining an e-zine would be too much work. Maybe you didn't think anyone would pay to subscribe, and why go through all that work for free? Well, here are some responses to your excuses.
E-ZINE MARKETING WON'T BOOST SITE TRAFFIC.
You've probably got repeat users on your site; those dedicated few who check up on you everyday to read any new posts no matter what. Obviously an e-zine won't make them come back more frequently. They already visit every day! How much more do you want them to view your site?
Then you've probably got those people who check you out once in awhile when they think of it. Those people might only visit the site once a month. What if they had subscribed to your e-zine because they liked your site so much and received it in their mailbox once a week? Wouldn't that remind them to go visit the site more?
And what about that one time user who came to your site, loved it, and then suffered from a minor head injury and partial amnesia and forgot all about your site. No traffic from this person. But what if they had subscribed to your e-zine? The reminder would be sitting in their mailbox, which they had stored the username and password for in case they did succumb to partial amnesia, and they would once again be able to visit your site. And who knows? Maybe visiting your site could trigger all of their memories to return. You'd be seen as the hero you are, all thanks to an e-zine.
And if you simply mail out the password to subscribers and have the e-zine posted on your site, then every time a subscriber reads the e-zine, they add one more hit to the site.
E-zines are a regular reminder to Internet users that your site is still around and worth checking out.
AN E-ZINE WON'T MAKE ME ANY MONEY AND ISN'T WORTH MY TIME.
Oh contraire. E-zine marketing can and does produce revenue. Ignore the fact that in the last section I showed you how e-zines increase site traffic and thus revenue. Think for a moment about affiliate marketing. What if you place some of your affiliate marketing links within the e-zine? By doing that you are sending your revenue generators directly to mailboxes instead of being forced to wait for consumers to come to you!
Also, who said that the e-zine has to be free, or that you can't have an upgraded e-zine available for a small fee? The upgraded version could have extra articles, more frequency or other nifty features that people would be dying to pay for. If people like what you have to say, then they will be willing to pay for it.
AN E-ZINE WOULD BE TOO HARD TO PRODUCE
As with so many things on the Internet, you have to remember that you're not alone. There is an entire market out there of people whose job it is to help you market online, and e-zine marketing is no different. There are websites out there that you can buy articles from to post and sites devoted to writers trying to find freelance jobs just like writing for your e-zine. Programs can be downloaded to help you with your formatting, and contact lists in e-mail programs make mass mailing a cinch.
I am not saying that creating an e-zine will be as easy as eating a sandwich, but it can be done without an obscene amount of work. The benefits are absolutely worth the cost in time or money. In today's Internet, e-zine marketing is a tool that cannot be ignored.
Showing posts with label ebay. Show all posts
Showing posts with label ebay. Show all posts
Sunday, October 17, 2010
Publishing A Newsletter
Today, many websites offer a free newsletter. Newsletters, from the receiving end, can be a great source for information that is delivered to your in-box. You can simply save the newsletter for future reference, something many people do. From the publisher's standpoint, though, a newsletter is a fantastic idea as it gives you a database of people who are interested in what you have to offer. Marketers know the value of this. But, aside from the potential financial benefit of such a mailing list, a newsletter is also a great way to keep in touch with users who may have only surfed across your website once. They may, on a whim, sign up for your newsletter and, thus, you have a way to keep in touch with them at a later date. You can also use your mailing list as a source for demographics information or opinions. Want to start a new feature on your site and want to know whether it will work or not? Survey the members of your mailing list.
So, let's take a look at what needs to be looked at to start your newsletter.
Length
It would be easy to send your users a long, winding email that requires them to scroll a long way to read the whole thing. However, in practice, this doesn't work very well. You want to keep your newsletter as brief as you can. If you include an article in your mailing, keep it brief and to the point. If the article is long, you could publish a portion of it and direct them to your website to read the rest of it.
Size
Newsletter size goes hand-in-hand with length, but with HTML newsletters being the norm today, it is possible to have very bloated HTML that does something that could be done otherwise with much less code. In short, then, keep your HTML efficient so that the size of the newsletter in kilobytes does not become too large. Remember, you're sending a lot of them (stress on the server) to people who may still have dial-up (slow download speeds).
Frequency
You need to decide how often you will publish your newsletter. Most are published weekly, bi-weekly, or monthly. If anything is published more often than that, be sure to make that very clear to new subscribers because mailings that are sent too often will cause some to unsubscribe because they find it annoying. Also, once you commit to a frequency, stick to it. If a newsletter is sent irregularly, people will find it useless or will not respect it. However, if it comes at the same time with constant frequency, they will come to expect it and you will gain the respect of having done what you said you would do.
Format
Most newsletters are offered in both HTML and Text formats and this is your best bet. Most users prefer HTML and HTML provides you with more flexibility to get your message across. Text emails are very plain looking, however they are smaller in size and readable in any email client (some email clients still have a hard time with HTML). It is best to publish in both formats and give subscribers a choice.
Method of Sending
You need to research and find a way to send your newsletter. Sending mass email is fairly server intensive, depending on the size of your mailing list. For very large lists, it is usual to go to an outside newsletter hosting company to publish the newsletter. These companies have dedicated servers and powerful mass email software in order to send your newsletter without a burp. If you send the newsletter in-house and your list is large, you will want to pay attention to how the mail is sent. We use a PHP-based system designed in house which throttles out-going email depending on site traffic - our way of placing a governor on the rate of sending and not drag our sites to a crawl.
Promotion
When you start your newsletter, you will need to promote for subscribers. If your site is already pretty well trafficked, your job just got a lot easier. Put the subscription form up on your website and begin to collect addresses. You will find that the rate of sign-ups will be very dependent on yoursite traffic. This action will result in sign-ups, however you may find that the rate of new sign-ups is still rather slow. You need to get their attention. A popup window is a popular and very workable way to do this. While many users don't like pop ups, this is a use of the popup which makes a lot of sense because it is so workable. Your subscription rate can easily double with this alone. When setting up thepopup, use a cookie to ensure that a user does not see the ad more than once for a certain timeframe. You might even want to mention this in the popup itself so that people who are more easily annoyed by them may calm down a bit. Set the popup to appear on their first page view or some other interval. When your code opens the popup, set the cookie. In subsequent page views, your code will detect the cookie and not open the window again.
Aside from the popup, make your subscription form prominent on your website. If you have a forum, see about putting an option into the registration process which will add them to your mailing list when they sign up. Also, invite people to invite friends to your mailing list.
Opt in and Double Opt In
An opt-in mailing list means that a person can visit your site, enter an email address and that address is subscribed. Double opt-in means that when they enter the email address, the system sends them an email which contains a link which they need to click to confirm their subscription. This two-stage setup provides more security because you know the address is valid and that the person signing up is indeed subscribing their own email and not somebody else. The opt-in method willresult in much higher subscription rates because you do not need to get the user to do anything else once they enter their address. Double opt-in is more secure, however you will have people who simply do not confirm, therefore the subscription rate will be slower. IF you are after sheer numbers, opt-in is you best method of address collection. However, this method is more open to fraudulent emails. If you use double opt-in, you may want to have a system which will send them a few reminders over time if they do not confirm. In using opt-in, at least send them an email confirming their subscription, with an option to unsubscribe right then and there if they are not the ones who subscribed the address. You might even want to include the IP address of the person who signed them up.
A newsletter is an excellent marketing resource for your website and, if you have not begun one, you should strongly consider it.
So, let's take a look at what needs to be looked at to start your newsletter.
Length
It would be easy to send your users a long, winding email that requires them to scroll a long way to read the whole thing. However, in practice, this doesn't work very well. You want to keep your newsletter as brief as you can. If you include an article in your mailing, keep it brief and to the point. If the article is long, you could publish a portion of it and direct them to your website to read the rest of it.
Size
Newsletter size goes hand-in-hand with length, but with HTML newsletters being the norm today, it is possible to have very bloated HTML that does something that could be done otherwise with much less code. In short, then, keep your HTML efficient so that the size of the newsletter in kilobytes does not become too large. Remember, you're sending a lot of them (stress on the server) to people who may still have dial-up (slow download speeds).
Frequency
You need to decide how often you will publish your newsletter. Most are published weekly, bi-weekly, or monthly. If anything is published more often than that, be sure to make that very clear to new subscribers because mailings that are sent too often will cause some to unsubscribe because they find it annoying. Also, once you commit to a frequency, stick to it. If a newsletter is sent irregularly, people will find it useless or will not respect it. However, if it comes at the same time with constant frequency, they will come to expect it and you will gain the respect of having done what you said you would do.
Format
Most newsletters are offered in both HTML and Text formats and this is your best bet. Most users prefer HTML and HTML provides you with more flexibility to get your message across. Text emails are very plain looking, however they are smaller in size and readable in any email client (some email clients still have a hard time with HTML). It is best to publish in both formats and give subscribers a choice.
Method of Sending
You need to research and find a way to send your newsletter. Sending mass email is fairly server intensive, depending on the size of your mailing list. For very large lists, it is usual to go to an outside newsletter hosting company to publish the newsletter. These companies have dedicated servers and powerful mass email software in order to send your newsletter without a burp. If you send the newsletter in-house and your list is large, you will want to pay attention to how the mail is sent. We use a PHP-based system designed in house which throttles out-going email depending on site traffic - our way of placing a governor on the rate of sending and not drag our sites to a crawl.
Promotion
When you start your newsletter, you will need to promote for subscribers. If your site is already pretty well trafficked, your job just got a lot easier. Put the subscription form up on your website and begin to collect addresses. You will find that the rate of sign-ups will be very dependent on yoursite traffic. This action will result in sign-ups, however you may find that the rate of new sign-ups is still rather slow. You need to get their attention. A popup window is a popular and very workable way to do this. While many users don't like pop ups, this is a use of the popup which makes a lot of sense because it is so workable. Your subscription rate can easily double with this alone. When setting up thepopup, use a cookie to ensure that a user does not see the ad more than once for a certain timeframe. You might even want to mention this in the popup itself so that people who are more easily annoyed by them may calm down a bit. Set the popup to appear on their first page view or some other interval. When your code opens the popup, set the cookie. In subsequent page views, your code will detect the cookie and not open the window again.
Aside from the popup, make your subscription form prominent on your website. If you have a forum, see about putting an option into the registration process which will add them to your mailing list when they sign up. Also, invite people to invite friends to your mailing list.
Opt in and Double Opt In
An opt-in mailing list means that a person can visit your site, enter an email address and that address is subscribed. Double opt-in means that when they enter the email address, the system sends them an email which contains a link which they need to click to confirm their subscription. This two-stage setup provides more security because you know the address is valid and that the person signing up is indeed subscribing their own email and not somebody else. The opt-in method willresult in much higher subscription rates because you do not need to get the user to do anything else once they enter their address. Double opt-in is more secure, however you will have people who simply do not confirm, therefore the subscription rate will be slower. IF you are after sheer numbers, opt-in is you best method of address collection. However, this method is more open to fraudulent emails. If you use double opt-in, you may want to have a system which will send them a few reminders over time if they do not confirm. In using opt-in, at least send them an email confirming their subscription, with an option to unsubscribe right then and there if they are not the ones who subscribed the address. You might even want to include the IP address of the person who signed them up.
A newsletter is an excellent marketing resource for your website and, if you have not begun one, you should strongly consider it.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)