Write A Newsletter To
Get Site Visitors To Return (And More)!
Article by Steve M Nash
How many visitors to your site ever return?
Not as many as you would like, I bet!
The thing is, it's a lot easier and less time-consuming to promote your site to people who have *already* visited. So how do you do that? Well, you could:
Yes, publish a newsletter (and get people to subscribe)!
Writing a newsletter is the
At the very least you can remind them about your website on a regular basis. But, even better, you get a chance to develop trust between your visitors and yourself.
And on the faceless Internet, trust is everything!
As with your website, you need to promote your newsletter and get people to sign-up. By all means start with your friends and family, and then try these legitimate methods (please don't send unsolicited mail - SPAM wastes everyone's time!):
You MUST promote your newsletter on your own site
You CAN announce your newsletter to the world
https://www.ezinelocater.com
Free Email Newsletter Directory
(More resources available in the full
version of this article - request your copy below.)
Okay, okay your newsletter may be too humble for all this promotion, but at the very least make it easy to sign-up on your website. Oh! One other way of promoting your newsletter:
You SHOULD make your newsletter a great read!
This is possibly the most important aspect of publishing a newsletter. Here are a few points to consider - try and make sure you:
Writing a newsletter is a bit difficult not to do yourself, I admit.
What I mean is that you can
find many Perl/CGI scripts that allow you to run a newsletter, including subscribe and unsubscribe functions, from your own site. Subscribe
Me Lite, written by
(And I use Aweber - not free though.)
https://www.siteinteractive.com
- Subscribe Me Lite
https://www.cgi-resources.com
https://responders.aweber.com
To counter the un-relenting spam that we all receive, spam-filters are everywhere.
What does this mean to you, the budding newsletter publisher?
Well, it means that you have to take great care now in what you write in your newsletter. If you don't, your publishing efforts will be wasted as the spam-filters will, wrongly, block your newsletter. And few of your subscribers will read it.
So don't forget the spam filters when you write your newsletter! Do a check to see if you need to change any part of it, first, before you send your mailing out.
You can do a spam-check here https://spamcheck.sitesell.com/
Spam is a bigger and bigger problem nowadays. Recently Ralph Wilson, Paul Myers, and other Net marketing gurus have written about the problems that spam 242t1913c is causing honest, hard working Net marketers.
Actually, while spam is the fundamental root of our problems, the anti-spam measures that large ISPs and important free e-mail hosts (like Hotmail and Yahoo! Mail) undertake are what hurts legitimate Net marketers.
Much like tuna nets catch dolphins by mistake, their spam filters catch us. So the SiteSell SpamCheck Tool is a quick way for honest marketers to make sure that their e-mails are less likely to be considered spam by ISPs, by Yahoo! Mail and Hotmail (which tosses you into their Junk folders) and even by individual filters set up by an ever-growing number of recipients around the world.
Writing a newsletter on a regular basis is a great way to keep people returning to your website. There are many tools and resources that show you how. And there are many sites that will publish your newsletter for free (you can even find free content, for goodness sake).
Publish a newsletter and get to know your site visitors - and then let them get to know you! Be original, if you can, and do make sure your ezine gets past the spam-filters.
https://www.ezineuniversity.com/
by
Dr. Ralph F. Wilson
Web Marketing Today,
Issue 45, June 1, 1998
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. 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.
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. If you need some guidance, take a look at our privacy policy (https://www.wilsonweb.com/clients/privacy-policy.htm) or the Direct Marketing Association (https://www.the-dma.org/pan7/dmers7c1-policy.shtml). 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 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.
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 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.
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. (See sidebar.) 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
We ought to start at the beginning. A mailing list program allows you to send out messages to everyone on the list of e-mail addresses. You send one copy of the newsletter (with a password) to the mailing list, and it takes care of distributing copies to each address on the list. Another form is a discussion list, which allows members to send messages to each other. When a member sends an e-mail message to the mailing list program, it echoes that message with in a few minutes to every member on the list. When lists get large, usually a moderator selected by the list owner screens messages before they are sent out, to cut down on clutter and keep the quality of content high.
Businesses depend upon keeping in touch with customers, informing them of sales and new products, as well as providing ongoing customer support after the sale. Discussion lists can focus on bug fixes, user groups, technical support, current issues, hobbyist interests, etc. Some businesses host discussion lists that provide information about whole industries, putting their business the "expert" role, and winning lots of publicity and business as a result. Newsletters and discussion lists are the life-blood of Internet businesses. The free mailing list programs bring this capability within the range of any size business.
All the lists we looked at included good tools to manage three types of mailing lists: (1) newsletter or announcement, (2) open discussion lists, and (3) moderated discussions. The latter allows a moderator to screen messages from members before they are sent to the lists.
They also provide important features to make the listowner's life easier. If you've had a mailing list, you know that subscribe and unsubscribe requests combined with bounced messages sent to obsolete addresses can eat up a lot of time. Using several sophisticated techniques, these programs automatically inactivate members whose messages bounce. Depending upon the type of bounce, they'll wait a few days or weeks before inactivating. When you consider that this saves many human hours of thankless list pruning, this is a great feature.
I suppose I need to pause at the word "free" to observe that nothing is completely free or these systems would soon collapse from economic starvation. Each of the sites I studied was advertising supported. They typically offer three types of ads:
You're exchanging "discrete" advertising for the opportunity to share some tremendous services. No, it's not free, but it seems like a fair trade.
If the services are so good, why would any business want to develop their own listservers and bulletin boards? Three reasons come to mind: (1) freedom from any advertising whatsoever, (2) the desire to sell ad space themselves, and (3) an unwillingness to "share" clients with the free sites who may distract customers with other discussion and newsletter lists. Building your own keeps the gate on the corral. Only larger companies can afford to build or buy programs that can match these free services, though many smaller businesses can purchase adequate programs if they need to.
My favorite of the
free lists I reviewed is eGroups. They've designed a list interface that is
quite easy to understand and navigate through, with a multitude of features to
accommodate various kinds of communication within the group. The mailing list
features work well, with both regular e-mail and digest options. In addition,
archives can be viewed at the group website -- helpful if a member goes on
vacation or just wants to avoid e-mail overload. When the moderator checks in,
he or she is presented with a list of people who have applied to be members
(unless you select open membership), and a list of messages to either approve
and send to the group or reject (unless you allow free posting). It's an
intuitive, well-designed system.
The extra features are attractive, too. The moderator can turn on or off a list of member profiles, a member's chatroom, a group calendar, a survey feature, and an area where members can post files and photos for others to see. There's also a rather flexible flat-file database that can be configured to contain a searchable FAQ, a list of parts, a list of companies and contacts, an annotated list of movies or books, etc. The only weakness I see is the inability of the moderator to prevent members from posting files to the 20 MB shared area, in case this space needs to be dedicated to business information, software patches, instructional course information, etc.
eGroups is alone at present in allowing the user to select between ASCII and HTML e-mail preferences. While this allows the user some choice in e-mail, eGroups gets the ability to charge its advertisers to send banner ads at the bottom of HTML e-mail.
But in spite of all its attractive features, eGroups has a serious flaw: businesses can't subscribe members using the business's own HTML form; subscribers must either send their own e-mail message or subscribe at the website. I had set up a list designed to carefully screen members in order to conduct a high level discussion, and had designed a 15-field form on my site to obtain that information. But eGroups misread the headers on e-mail from this form and subscribed my e-mail server to the list rather than the person who filled out the form. Oops. eGroups explain the program's failure to accept standard e-mail messages as an attempt to prevent people from spamming the list with unwilling subscribers. I think this severely limits serious business use of eGroups, and I hope they'll change their mind. But for many purposes, however, eGroups will work quite well by placing the eGroups supplied form on your site. It's my personal favorite of those I reviewed -- even though I won't be able to use it because of this flaw.
ONEList is the leader
in free mailing list field, with the longest track record, the highest Web
traffic, and claims of 165,000 lists. Media Metrix recently ranked ONEList as
the 22nd largest Web Service, and number 230 of the Top 500 most-visited Web
sites in April 1999, with a reach more than twice that of its closest competitor.
They have worked hard to develop a sturdy infrastructure that is able to
deliver e-mail to list members within seconds, and handle very large lists,
numbering in the tens of thousands of members.
From a functional standpoint, ONEList excels in welcoming Web communities. Potential community members can subscribe at the ONEList site as well as via e-mail message from the user. Businesses can visitors using their own subscription forms. Within the list space, members can read posts online, view other members' profiles, and share documents with each other in a 5 MB shared file space. In contrast to eGroups, this space can be restricted from members if the moderator chooses. Multiple moderators can be selected, and given various privileges. Users that post from two e-mail addresses can set up a second alias so the list can accept messages from both. In addition to a survey that shows both a graph and text report of results, ONEList includes a unique calendar system that can automatically e-mail reminders to list members on specific dates.
I didn't like ONEList's interface as well as some others. And ONEList's in-your-face blue and orange color clash made me feel somewhat uncomfortable at the site. From a functional standpoint, though, ONEList is a top notch program that can serve business purposes well.
Topica is the newcomer
among free e-mail lists. Their philosophy is "opt-in". If you don't
want ads on your e-mail messages, there is no charge to opt-out. Nor are there
any restrictions at all on maximum message size; eGroups and ONEList allow up
to 500K, and ListBot Gold up to 250K in size. Topica
offers an attractive and easy-to-use interface for users and moderators with
one drawback. Since the interface requires frames, WebTV members won't be able
to use it easily. Both ONEList and Topica allow the moderator to ban members so
they cannot resubscribe, a handy feature to rid
yourself of obnoxious members -- until you realize how easy it is to obtain one
more free e-mail address.
At present Topica is concentrating on its e-mail features, and does not offer shared space, calendars, and the like. It does, however, allow businesses to subscribe people from their own forms, and provides an abundance of features for managing e-mail lists. PC Magazine selected Topica among its list of "100 Top Websites."
ListBot, owned by MSN
LinkShare, is one of the oldest free e-mail lists, designed especially for
businesses. It offers many list management features common to the other lists,
except that members are not able to select a digest feature. The major
difference between ListBot and the rest is the form that it requires
prospective list members to fill out. Listowners can decide which fields to
place on the form and require of members, and includes a number of choices of
demographic and interests data. If you need an easy way to collect data as
people subscribe, here's the tool. But there's a downside. The data collection
form includes no privacy policy link or statement, de rigueur in these
days when both the EU and the FTC are concerned about data collection policies.
ListBot is designed to administer a single list and does not allow multiple
moderators, customizable message trailers, etc.
As one who has used Majordomo as my list manager for about four years too long, these feature-rich free mailing list programs are like a breath of fresh air, and offer features to both the moderator and participants will appreciate.
by Christopher Heng, thesitewizard.com
There are some good reasons for running a newsletter or mailing list:
Such newsletters are useful both to you (as a web designer) and to your readers: you get a chance to reach your audience with your information, and your audience gets the information they wanted (which was why they subscribed in the first place). There's also a side benefit: some of your readers will return to your site to check out the new stuff mentioned in your newsletter.
There are basically two indispensable things in running a newsletter:
The easiest way to run a newsletter is to let a third party mailing list service handle the dirty work, freeing you to concentrate on your content. There are both commercial and free mailing list hosting services available. You can find a list of free mailing list hosts from thefreecountry.com's Free Mailing List Hosts page. I have also reviewed a few of these services in the past, including the following reviews:
Review
of Topica
https://www.thesitewizard.com/archive/topica.shtml
Review of Yahoo! Groups
https://www.thesitewizard.com/reviews/yahoogroups.shtml
The advantages of using a third party service (whether commercial or free) are:
If you use a third party mailing list service, you may encounter the following disadvantages:
Another way to run your mailing list is to use the services provided by your web host. Most web hosts provide you with the facility to run your own mailing list. Some provide fairly sophisticated automated systems that can archive past issues of your ezines, send requests for confirmations, handle subscriptions and unsubscribes without your intervention, etc.
Using your host's mailing list software has the advantage that it is free (or rather, you have already paid for it as part of your web hosting package) and is (usually) ad-free (ie, no advertisements are inserted). Depending on the software your host uses, you also have quite good control over the list: you can add subscribers, remove them, block certain subscribers, change the confirmation messages, etc. In addition, the automated system also frees you from the chore of manually adding and removing subscribers.
The disadvantage is that many web hosts impose a limit to the number of subscribers you can have in your list. This is to prevent their mailing servers from becoming overloaded from messages emanating from your list.
There are also numerous free mailing list CGI scripts as well as PHP scripts that allow you to run a mailing list from your website even if your host does not provide mailing list facility for your account. For example, you can find some on the thefreecountry.com's Free Mailing List CGI Scripts page at https://www.thefreecountry.com/perlscripts/mailinglists.shtml
Owing to the nature of such software, the CGI scripts often require your users to subscribe and unsubscribe only using the web interface. Some scripts support the double opt-in of the mailing list providers: they automatically send an email to the subscriber with a special URL that they must click on to confirm their subscription; others simply send subscribers a message with information on how to unsubscribe and the like. You will often have to handle the bounced mail yourself by manually deleting the subscriber from your list when you received bounced messages.
Sometimes, if your mailing list is small, it may be possible to use your email software to manage your list. Some email software have sophisticated mailing list management facilities. Others are designed with mailing lists in mind.
The advantage of this method is obvious: you are not dependent on your web host nor do you have to pay a third party mailing list host to handle your list.
The disadvantages of this are:
What should you put in your mailing list or newsletter? That's really up to you, of course.
Some people hold discussion lists (where even subscribers can contribute to the list). Others use it as a place to make product announcements. For example, my Logtime mailing list was designed for users of the software to receive notification everytime a new version is released. Another use for the newsletter is what I do with the thefreecountry.com's newsletter: subscribers receive periodic issues telling them of new free webmaster and programmer resources that I find, prior to my posting them onto thefreecountry.com. Or you could send articles to your subscribers, like what I do with thesitewizardT newsletter.
Incidentally, I would suggest that your newsletter contain things useful to your readers rather than just one long string of advertisements. My personal policy is to not to send out an issue if I don't have anything significant to say rather than to send out a useless issue.
You can publish your newsletter using HTML or send it out in plain text.
Sending your newsletter in the HTML format allows you to format your newsletter with fonts, colours and even embed pictures. However not everyone appreciates HTML email, and some even filter out all HTML mail on the grounds that such email are most likely to be spam. HTML messages tend to be larger than plain text messages too, so if you're paying your mailing list provider according to bandwidth used, you may want to factor that into your calculations.
If, however, you choose to send your newsletters in plain text, here are some tips to help you get the maximum effect from your newsletter:
https://www.thesitewizard.com/
Most modern email software and web email interfaces will automatically make
that into a clickable link. AOL's email client does not however. The latter
require that you write an HTML link for it to be clickable.
mailto:subscribe@thesitewizard.com
Again, this will be rendered as a clickable link by most modern email software.
You probably have enough tips to start you off on your own newsletter here. The rest of the stuff pretty much depends on what you want to do with your newsletter.
Happy writing!
Copyright 2000-2002 by Christopher Heng. All rights
reserved.
Get more free tips and articles like this, on web design, promotion, revenue
and scripting, from https://www.thesitewizard.com/
This article can be found at https://www.thesitewizard.com/archive/newsletter.shtml
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