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• Increasing the circulation of your print publication. If this is your top priority, consider offering a free print publication to recipients of your e-letter, if they request it. • Driving your print subscribers to your Web site. Many publishers are finding they would rather readers pay up for their site than their print publication because printing and renewal notice costs are much lower. If this is the case, make sure you offer enough information to tempt readers into going to your site . . . but that you don’t offer so much they don’t need to click. • Making your e-mail newsletter a self-supporting, paid service. If this is the case, make sure you provide enough "meat" for readers to chew on, or they won’t renew. PC World, The Christian Science Monitor, Slate and others have had varying degrees of success with paid e-mail newsletters. Draw Up Your Schedule How often you distribute your electronic newsletter is as important as what’s in it. Workforce Online spent last year stepping up efforts to get reciprocal links, redesigning the site, adding new features, and increasing phone and e-mail correspondence with users and industry leaders. We had more to tell users, so we increased our frequency from biweekly to weekly. The result: an increase in site traffic at an unbelievable rate — for example, about 45% between February and March 1999 alone. Subject Headings Matter More and more people are getting more and more e-mail newsletters. They’re likely to delete them before they even open them if the subject heading is dry and boring. Call your e-letter "Weekly News from Washington" and it’s destined for the cyberjunkyard. Call it "The Many Faces of Bill Clinton," and people will open it. "Mergers and Acquisitions" won’t drive as much traffic as "Citicorp and Travelers: A Happy Marriage?" Also, you may want to personalize the e-letter by including the recipient’s name or area of interest in the subject line.
Provide a Table of Contents Make it easy on readers. Give them the chance to scroll down to the sections they’re most interested in. Remember, the more you make your newsletter a time-efficient read, the less likely users are to get frustrated and unsubscribe. Keep the Readers Involved Chat groups, newsgroups, forums, message boards, listservs — they’re enormously popular. Add your own interactive features. Consider comments from users: letters to the editor, product reviews, or even political points. Occasionally include a complimentary piece of feedback. Send relevant e-mail messages to segmented sections of your readership. Useful Information, Quickly The boy who cried wolf is alive and well over the Internet. Provide useful information. Otherwise, you’re wasting people’s time, and they’ll take their names off your list. Y2k Alert, a newsletter known for its sky-is-falling warnings of the coming computer bug, was sending out such a long e-mail newsletter, of such frequency (sometimes more than once a day) that folks started unsubscribing. Now, the company’s newsletter features five or six very short bullet points letting readers know what’s online. Advertising vs. Editorial E-mail newsletters can be a great source of ad revenue. Just make sure the advertisements are short, unobtrusive, and that they don’t take away from the flow of the newsletter. Also, make sure you clearly distinguish advertising from editorial. Watch Your Competition E-mail technology is moving quickly; be ahead of the curve. It’s like the old story Ronald Reagan used to tell about two backpackers who were hiking in the woods and ran into a bear. One man panicked, while the other calmly changed into his running shoes. The panicked camper asked the other how he thought they would outrun the bear. "I don’t have to outrun the bear," said the calm man. "I just have to outrun you." Return to the Main Archives Page
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