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July 1, 2001 Newsletter
E-mail Newsletters -- Best Practices Equal Profitability
Despite their well-known ability to generate revenue and leverage your brand, e-mail newsletters are often over-looked or under-used by today’s publishers.
Why?
Perhaps there is a fear that e-mail newsletters will be seen as SPAM, or unsolicited bulk e-mail. Perhaps there is the perception that e-mail newsletters are costly or difficult to produce. Perhaps there is just a lack of understanding about how to deploy an e-mail newsletter and the benefits it can provide.
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If you’ve been collecting e-mail addresses as part of your subscription or site registration drives, you are in an excellent position.
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In any event, e-mail newsletters are a powerful tool in your publishing arsenal, and this primer should help you leverage their benefits in the years to come.
The key to a successful e-mail newsletter is to get a good list of e-mail addresses. If you’ve been collecting e-mail addresses as part of your subscription or site registration drives, you are in an excellent position. You’re in even better shape if you’ve developed and instituted (by putting on your web site) a privacy policy that says you will use e-mail addresses to send readers information from your publication(s) and advertisers. And you’re in the best shape of all if you’ve thought to put a opt-in check-box on the form where you collect the e-mail address asking the reader if they want to receive e-mails from you and your advertisers.
Now that you’ve got a list, what do you distribute? For smaller publications, you can use the e-mail newsletter to promote new content posted to your web site, or to promote articles and issues that will be covered in the next print issue. Remember not to put the whole text in an e-mail; use a lead or teaser paragraph and link back to the full story on your web site. This will drive traffic to the site, increasing the value of that product as well.
For larger publishers, consider developing special, e-mail only content, automated alerts based on subject, or even letting users select the types of information they would like to receive in an e-mail newsletter, and developing a content management tool to automatically distribute that material to them.
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You can even develop a separate newsletter for your advertisers, letting them know what is going on in your publication or on your web site, and keeping them informed about all of the ways they can do business with you.
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If you have enough content, consider multiple lists, based either on reader interest or subject area. CIO, for example, maintains multiple e-mail newsletters, including a newsletter targeted at marketing, and other lists based on subject area. Users who want to subscribe or unsubscribe are directed to a web page that lists all of the available newsletters, so while you may be unsubscribing from one list, you may find another that suits your fancy. Be creative. Innovate.
You can even develop a separate newsletter for your advertisers, letting them know what is going on in your publication or on your web site, and keeping them informed about all of the ways they can do business with you. While you may feel like a pest calling them every week to check in, a useful, informative e-mail newsletter will get through to those prospects and it will enhance your publication’s brand in their minds.
So where is the cash? Well, consider selling sponsorships of your newsletters. And since you’ll be directing traffic from the newsletter back to the site, consider bundling an ad on the newsletter with ads on the web pages that it links to. Banner rates for newsletters range from $30 to $100 per thousand recipients, depending on your publication’s average CPM and the type of content you’re delivering in the newsletter. The cost to distribute your newsletters ranges from $10 per thousand (what we at GCN charge for distributing e-mail newsletters) to $50 per thousand or more for some of the higher-priced, third-party ASP-type offerings.
Finally, when distributing your e-mail newsletter, keep in mind that while many people do have e-mail programs that can read HTML, some do not. Downloading the graphics in an HTML e-mail newsletter over a modem line from a hotel room is not going to endear you to your readers. Remember that you don’t want readers to unsubscribe, so try not to piss them off by being clever.
What’s more, when you forward a message or newsletter with HTML in it from one user to another, most mailers break the HTML into a jumble of unreadable characters. This means that the pretty, well-formatted HTML newsletter you’re sending out gets killed on pass-along. On the other hand, studies have shown that well-designed HTML e-mail newsletters trigger a higher response rate on the click throughs back to your site. So consider offering your readers a choice between HTML and text-only, or if you can’t offer them a choice, send the newsletter in plain text.
So that’s really all there is to it. Distributing an e-mail newsletter to your readers and advertisers is, in the words of the immortal Martha, “A good thing.” All you have to do is figure out what you want to send, and who you want to sell it to.
For information on our e-mail newsletter distribution services or any of GCN’s other Internet design, development and consulting services, click here. 
| The Legend of 602-P
If you’ve recently run across e-mail claiming that the greedy U. S. Postal Service wants the government to start charging you for e-mail, relax. This one is a hoax.
According to CNN, this urban legend has been circulating the Internet for years, and despite what the USPS is trying to do right now with our print distributions, there is no move afoot to begin charging postage for e-mail.
The legend of bill 602-P claims that the USPS loses $230 million per year because people use e-mail instead of snail-mail, and it wants to recoup some of that lost revenue by having the U. S. government charge a 5-cent “alternative postage fee” on each e-mail message sent in the United States.
If you’re feeling a bit dumb about having forwarded information on 602-P to a colleague, don’t. During the 2000 race for the U. S. Senate, candidates Rick Lazio and Hillary Clinton both said they opposed 602 P. Hillary admitted she wasn’t familiar with the legislation, but Lazio went so far as to declare it an example of excessive government.
Way to go Rick!
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In This Issue
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The Legend of 602-P
Final Analysis:
GCN’s creative, technical and business team scrutinizes IDG's CIO.com. See how this publication’s Web site fairs under our constructive critique.
Sales Tip:
Want to Sell Beyond the Banner? Offer sponsored text links with a short descriptive text feature. Place them in a tinted sidebar that is clearly labeled “Sponsored Links”. This visually separates them from your editorial content.
Upcoming Events:
July 12
BPA/ABM University
BPA International
Hyatt Regency Chicago
Chicago, IL
212.779.3200 ext. 150
bpai.com
September 10-11
b2b 2001 e-Media Conference & Expo
American Business Media
The Roosevelt Hotel
New York, NY
212.661.6360
americanbusiness
media.com
Fall 2001
Date To Be Announced
GCN Publishing
Maximizing Your Magazine’s Integrated Revenue Streams
New York, NY
516.767.3325
November 8
Setting Your Magazine’s Online Business Strategy
GCN Publishing
MPA Headquarters
New York, NY
212.872.3700
magazine.org
Next Issue:
Sizing Up Your Development Partner: The Good The Bad, The Ugly
Missed Last Issue?
How To Use The Internet To Drive Circulation
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