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e-mail newsletter basics
By Jennie
L. Phipps • Bankrate.com
If you're considering starting an e-mail newsletter,
here are the three most important lessons you need to learn: Carefully
gather e-mail addresses, create good content and find someone to
deliver.
Carefully gather e-mail
addresses.
The most promising addresses are those you collect yourself from
people who are interested in your particular enterprise. John M.
Palms Jr., vice president of marketing for e2Communications,
an e-mail marketing firm in Dallas, thinks conventional direct mail
is the best way to build a local e-mail list and stimulate traffic
to your small-business Web site.
If you buy a direct-mail list and send snail-mail
post cards, you won't risk angering users who just hate the idea
of getting unsolicited e-mail, better known as spam. Two good online
places to start looking for local mailing lists are List Bazaar
and Getlists.com.
Expect to pay about 50 cents an address for a highly targeted list,
and less if you are blanketing a local area.
Palms advises offering an incentive on the postcard
to get people to go to your Web site and register -- for instance,
a discount coupon or a small gift. When they register, give them
an opportunity to tell you whether they are willing to receive more
e-mail. If they say no, then honor your offer, but throw away the
address. If they agree, then you send another e-mail requiring their
confirmation. If they do, you can put them on your list. In this
way you will be creating what is known as a double opt-in e-mail
list -- customers get two chances to reject your offer.
Other successful ways to gather addresses include:
- Paying employees a small amount of money
or offer some other kind of incentive to get them to sign up customers
on the spot.
- Offering your customers an incentive to get
their friends to register.
You also can buy lists of e-mail addresses.
Legitimate mailing lists can cost anywhere from $150 to $500 per
1,000 addresses. When considering purchasing a list of e-mail addresses,
ask the seller how the names were collected. Straight spam won't
be valuable to you.
Choose a seller who says he's offering double
opt-in lists and then ask a few more questions, including where
they got the list and how much detail they know about it. If they
can't give demographics beyond a ZIP code, it's probably a straight
spam list.
Be sure to inquire about how often they perform
maintenance on the list. e-mail addresses change frequently. If
they don't update the list regularly, you could be buying a list
full of bouncebacks. There are many reputable e-mail list companies
out there; here are some good places to start your research:
No matter what your subject matter, here are
three general rules for making your e-mail newsletter a compelling
read, from marketing guru Marcia Yudkin, author of Internet
Marketing for Less Than $500/Year.
Shorter is better.
Offering a short newsletter means that it will be consistently read.
If the newsletter is long, most people won't read it. When people
know from experience without even opening the e-mail that it will
be long, they'll just kill it out without even looking.
Be timely.
Set up a regular schedule and stick to it. Even though the newsletter
is free, if you don't deliver it predictably, people will wonder
if you're reliable and whether you'll fulfill other promises you
make.
Proofread and proofread
again.
Silly mistakes, poor English and unconventional grammar all make
you look unprofessional, and they can drive away business if they
inconvenience your customer. So make sure the phone numbers and
prices are correct and the rest of the material says what you want
it to.
Find someone to deliver
If your list is small and delivered infrequently, you might consider
doing all the work yourself using ordinary e-mail software such
as Eudora or Outlook Express, but remember, somebody has to manage
the list. This includes subscribing and unsubscribing members, which
can be a major task once your list climbs beyond a few names.
If you think you can handle most of the work
but need access to a server to distribute quickly and reliably,
consider an inexpensive e-mail management service such as ListBot,
a Microsoft company. For less than $100 a year, ListBot offers sophisticated
tools for archiving, subscribing and unsubscribing, and ad-free
distribution.
Another low-cost option is SparkList.com.
SparkList starts at $50 a month. Or try Lyris.com,
which will manage and distribute a small e-mail list for about $100
a month.
Companies that offer services at the next level
-- including list development, personalization, automatic responses
and sequential mailings -- cost considerably more. Palms, whose
Dallas-based e2Communications works with a variety of clients of
various sizes, the largest of which is retailer J.C. Penney, estimates
that a program will cost at least $3,500 a year if the customer
provides content and does things like HTML coding himself.
Companies that provide this kind of e-mail marketing
are widely available and location isn't really an issue. Some large
ones worth considering are Responsys Inc.,
e-mailChannel
Inc. and e-Dialog.
Before you sign up with any kind of e-mail distribution
company, ask these key questions:
- How do you handle bounced addresses? You
don't want names removed on one bounce, and you want to be notified.
- How much down time did the company have last
month?
- How long will it take to deliver the list?
Are there times when the server's so busy that delivery is delayed?
- Are customer service representatives available
on the phone at least during regular business hours?
- Will there be a representative assigned to
my account who will work regularly with me?
- How long does it take to respond to a customer's
request to change his e-mail address or remove him from the list?
Jennie L. Phipps is a freelance
writer based in Michigan
-- Posted: Nov. 30, 2000
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