Internet Marketing Course -
Email Newsletters

Publishing an Email Newsletter (e-Newsletter) is perhaps the single best use of this medium to help retain, stay in touch with your current members and to (eventually) convert first-time visitors to "members" (i.e. become, at a minimum, email newsletter recipients).

What is an Email Newsletter?

An email newsletter is a regularly scheduled, consistently formatted (predictable, easy-to-follow format (text-only, HTML or both), short (2 screens at most) update on the topic(s) covered on your Web site that your site visitors have opted into receiving.

Typically, the email newsletter will have a headline followed by 3-5 "bulleted" topics listed in the order that they are covered in the email, followed by a brief (2-3 sentences) description of each topic including a hyperlink back to the full "story" on your Web site.

Most email newsletters that have a sizable readership (5,000 or more readers) can also get companies to sponsor (advertise) in each edition. A typical ad consists of 5 lines of text (usually 60 characters wide, including spaces) that includes one hyperlink to back the advertiser's Web site home page or to a special page deeper in the Web site.

Why should you bother?

Think about it - you spend countless hours and your precious few promotional dollars trying to attract new visitors to your Web site. Once there, you have as few as 30 seconds to tell your story and convert those first-time visitors to "members" (someone who returns to your site again and again, buys something, etc.). The odds of successfully performing that conversion on the first visit at a high enough rate to justify the expense of attracting new visitors to your site is very low.

Instead, your goal for first-time visitors should be to interest them enough in your site content so that they sign-up for your site's email newsletter. This is a much more achievable goal and now gives you a number of times (with each edition of the email newsletter) to bring those visitors back to your site and convert them to "paying" customers.

Be sure to "ask for the order" on every page on your site - ask visitors to sign-up (enter their email address into a form) to receive your email newsletter. Have at least one page on your site dedicated to your email newsletter (what's in each issue, sign-up procedure, etc.).

There are a number of Web-based companies that will both host your email address list (including a mechanism for you to sign-up new members to your list from your Web site) and also provide a broadcast system for you to send your email newsletters to all of the addresses on your list. Some companies even provide these services "free of charge". This usually means that they insert a sponsorship ad into each of your emails from a company whose products and/or services match your membership's interests as closely as possible. These email list hosting/newsletter distribution companies charge a fee to the advertising companies for this service. You can usually eliminate the third party advertising (and start charging other companies to sponsor your newsletter) for as little as $30.00 per month to send as many as 20,000 emails per month.

As you can see, there are a number of steps involved in creating, producing and distributing a high-quality email newsletter. And it can be very time consuming. That's why many site owners farm this activity out to companies or individuals who do this for a living.

Why farm it out? Unless writing tight, fact-filled, interesting copy is a core competency, farm it out (if you can afford to). It's a way to insure consistency in both email newsletter content and delivery, and it allows you to continue doing what it is that's bringing visitors to your site in the first place.

What follows is a great war story written by Debbie Weil, President of Wordbiz.com, and a B2B Email Marketing "pro", about how she started her own email newsletter. It's great because it not only gives a number of the nitty gritty details, but it also accurately captures the amount of effort involved in doing this properly.

Anatomy of an E-Newsletter Launch

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