How To Start Your Own NewsletterYour Road Plan To Email Marketing Success |
6. Write Attractive DescriptionsWrite attractive descriptions Most ezine directories, forums, discussion boards, and websites allow you to advertise your ezine by listing them on their site and providing a short description along with it. This is crucial – the first thing readers would look at is your subscription offer. Thus, it may be a good strategy to have at least 3 or 4 descriptions about your ezine catering to different kinds of audiences. You also need an eye catching heading. While writing the description, address the reader. Do not just describe your ezine or your company; explain how the ezine would be helpful to your readers – I know I have mentioned this many times earlier and would probably keep on accentuating this point many more times through the course of this book. It only goes to show the importance of addressing the needs of your prospective customer. The key is to tell the reader what he/she will get by subscribing to your ezine. List your ezines in directories and forums Once you have the descriptions written, you should make an all out effort to list your ezine with as many directories, websites, forums, and discussion boards as possible. A list of such directories and forums is given later on in this eBook. You will start building a subscription base after listing your ezine with directories. Use your competition to your advantage Each of your ezine must be targeted to the right kind of audience. You cannot market your ezine to a very broad audience and expect huge success. This would not only reduce your success chances but also cost you considerable time, money and effort. How do you list your ezines in the right directories? The simple answer to this is by studying your competition. Your aim should be to list your ezines in places that list your competitor ezines. Of course, you need to make your subscription offer far more attractive than your competitor’s to have a higher subscription rate. Finding places that list your competitor ezines requires significant research. Start with finding ezines that are related to yours by surfing the various directories, forums and boards mentioned later on in this eBook. Once you have the ezines listed you should make a list of your competitors' subscription URL's and your competitors' subscription email addresses Having a list of URLs would make it easier for you to search for places that list these ezines. Doing a simple search on various search engines can get you the desired results. Ensure that you list your ezine in all directories that list your competitor’s ezine. There are other advantages of reviewing your competitor ezines. You'll find many great resources and articles in these ezines which you can use not only for your personal benefit, but also for the benefit of your future subscribers. These ezines can be a great source for improving the content of your own ezines. Use your website well The easiest way to build a subscriber base is to invite people to subscribe on your website. That’s pretty much a must and is probably where you’ll get most of your readers. You could do that by devoting a little space on your home page or by adding a little pop-up when a user logs in, or logs out. But you could go further. There’s no reason why you couldn’t devote an entire site to recruiting readers which you could then promote in all the usual ways. You’d just need a homepage with good call-to-action copy, a free sample, and perhaps a secure area for subscribers to read back-copies. Very little effort and potentially large rewards. In fact, whenever you collect someone’s e-mail, for whatever reason, ask them if they want to take your newsletter. Cross Market your ezine Cross marketing is a very effective way of marketing your ezines and building your subscription base. We will only touch on some of the strategies to cross market your ezine. These are explained in more detail in the chapter on Advertising. Cross market as the name suggests involves forming alliances with your competitors so that both parties can benefit. Some of the forms of cross marketing are providing endorsements, exchanging content or articles, and exchanging ads. One way to form an alliance is by having an agreement with your competitor that you would endorse his/her ezine in yours and he/she reciprocates by doing the same thing. However, ensure that you endorse an ezine that you think is worth it. Do not ever endorse something just for the sake of building relationships. This can have dire effects on your campaign later on. Secondly, you could swap your ads with other ezines. For instance, you could publish your ad in a competitor’s ezine allowing him to do the same in yours. Besides, by doing so you wouldn’t have to pay for the ad. Thirdly, you could exchange content with your competitor ezine. For instance, you may request your competitor to publish one of your articles in every issue of their ezine. To reciprocate you could publish one of their’s in your own ezine. Content exchange can yield great results for your campaign. However, you need to make sure that the article you submit is compelling and includes a signature at the end. Word of mouth “Word of mouth” advertising can be very effective. Besides, it is completely free. The Internet takes this ancient form of "buzz" and promotion and amplifies it with a global network of people connected digitally. "Word of mouth" now has an Internet version called "word of mouse" (computer mouse). With greatly increased speeds, people refer things to their friends and families spreading the word through the Internet and to the far-reaching corners of the world. This can be done for your ezines as well. Many smart marketers and publicity people have learned to harness the power of viral publicity with Internet "Tell-A-Friend" promotional techniques and tools. Providing incentives as part of the “Tell-A-Friend” technique ensures higher success rate. For instance, the website www.wz.com conducted a giveaway contest where they gave away 4 Sony PS2's before Christmas as a website promotion. They also gave people who had entered the Giveaway the opportunity to get additional entries and additional chances to win by telling a few of their friends on the “Thank You” page. On the “Thank You” page, every giveaway entrant received the following message: "Tell your friends about WZ.com, and get an additional entry for each friend you email." In return for the favor, they received an additional chance to win for every friend they refer. This simple addition increased Tell-a-Friend results by 96 times. So how do you use this technique to leverage and increase your subscription rate, and "word of mouse" publicity? It's simple, just "Tell-A-Friend" or "Tell-A-Friend about everything”! You can add Viral "Tell-A-Friend" forms to all of your web pages just below the subscription offer. This technique is simple and very effective. Offer your ezines to all your customers, friends, relatives, and colleagues. Let them spread the word. Offer your ezine as a promotional tool to your affiliates if you have an affiliate program. These can drastically improve the subscriptions to your ezine. Building a subscriber list requires some effort – managing it requires even more effort. You have to ensure that the whole process of adding new subscribers and administering your list should be quick and efficient. I would highly recommend automating this process with the help of ezine software discussed later in this chapter. Apart from this, there are a few other recommendations that may help you manage your subscribers well. Always acknowledge all requests sent by existing subscribers as well as prospective ones. This includes any queries a subscriber may have as well as un-subscribe requests. Greet new subscribers with a Thank You/Welcome message that once again lists all the benefits of your newsletter. This would build confidence amongst your readers that they chose the right newsletter. Offer multiple options to sign up. Two of the most popular ones are through a sign up page on your website and through Email. Update subscriber email addresses as often as possible. Many a times publishers are faced with bad email addresses that bounce back your ezine. You should try and keep such addresses to a minimum. Keep in mind that subscriber management is a never ending process. Always provide excellent and prompt customer service to your readers. Be polite even if the other person is rude. Automate most, if not all the processes. As you build up your subscriber list, you’re going to find yourself with a problem. Whichever mail program you’re using, whether it’s Outlook or Eudora or something else, it’s just not going to be set up to deal with the kind of mass mailing involved with newsletters. If you have more than 50 people on your list—and that will probably take you less than a week—you’ll need to use a listserv. Don’t even try to do this by yourself! My hosting company organizes this for me. They have a mail server that handles all the mail. I just sent them the newsletter and they send it out. Alternatively, you can use a professional list server such as Microsoft’s List Builder. There are a number of paid list servers found on the Internet. Some of these are listed below. Listbox Prices start at as little as $5, but this is for a list of less than 500 subscribers. For a reasonably sized list of between 1,000 and 10,000 the price rises to $30, allowing you to post out once per week. Sparklist Sparklist has a seemingly attractive rate of just $1 per 1,000. However, there is a one-off set-up fee of $25 (for a list of less than 2,000) and a minimum monthly fee of $50. Biglist Biglist has a set-up fee of $50 and a monthly starting rate of $40 for a list of less than 500 subscribers. This monthly fee rises to $120 for a list of between 5,000 and 10,000 subscribers. Dundee Internet Services Dundee Internet Services provide a number of choices. For a basic mailing service the set-up fee is $40. There is an additional monthly maintenance fee of $25 and charge for mailings at a rate of $0•45 per 1,000 based upon a message size not exceeding 8kb. There are free list servers available too. While you can use these if you’re on a really tight budget, I don’t recommend it. First, they stuff their own advertisements onto your newsletter. This doesn’t just reduce the effectiveness of your brand, but it draws attention away from your own ads—provided you can persuade people to advertise on a newsletter like this. Their privacy policies have also come under a lot of criticism lately and even some of the biggest companies have been found to have used their clients’ lists to market their own goods. Handling unsubscribe requests is as important as handling requests for new subscribers. At times it can be a time-consuming and tiring process. However, you must handle it regularly and attend to it without fail, as it is a part of your duty as Ezine publisher. The choice to join or leave your Ezine is entirely your readers’; hence if they choose to discontinue receiving your Ezine in their inbox, you must honor that request. You can also automate this process of unsubscribe, but it also helps if you provide different options to your readers. The following options can be utilized for handling unsubscribe requests: Through website Your readers can directly visit your website and click on the link which probably says ‘unsubscribe from our Ezine/newsletter’. Then you can provide a box where they can enter their email address or there are ‘login’ and ‘password’ boxes and after entering this information, your readers can choose to unsubscribe from your Ezine. It is a good practice to send an email on the address the reader has provided to double check that the user has indeed opted to unsubscribe. Some publishers choose to keep the email address active on their mailing list and only if the user confirms that he or she has indeed decided to opt out, only then they will be unsubscribed. This is done to avoid any misuse of automatic programs to unsubscribe as well as to make sure that only the actual reader has decided to unsubscribe and not anyone else posing as the reader. Providing a link You can also provide a link at the footer of your Ezine which directs your reader to your website. And then you can follow the procedure mentioned above to unsubscribe your readers. Through email Your readers can email you their unsubscribe requests on a specific email address you have allotted for handling unsubscribe requests. You can make the task easier for you and them by suggesting that they type the word ‘unsubscribe’ in the subject line so that you can direct their email in the appropriate folder. You can automate this process by using the auto-responder and send an immediate reply to your reader that you have put their request under consideration. And the second time when you have actually removed their contact from the mailing list. Bounced or undeliverable Emails are one of the main concerns of most publishers. Rarely would you find that out of all the email addresses that subscribed for your ezine, all work properly. Some of them are bound to be either temporarily unavailable or permanently discontinued. Bounced Emails can be divided into two categories – soft bounce and hard bounce. Soft bounce is when the email is not working temporarily. This could be due to network slow down or congestion or other similar reasons. Hard Bounce is perhaps more of a concern due to the fact that it deals with permanent issues such as wrong email address, inactive or closed email address or other similar cases. You would think that whenever you face such a problem all you would need to do is to remove the email addresses that are wrong or closed. However, the actual difficulty lies in differentiating between soft and hard bounces. How do you know which email address is down temporarily and which one permanently? The solution to this is to make use of Ezine distribution softwares or services discussed later on in this section. These would automatically delete hard bounced email addresses from your database. Manual handling of bounced emails can be extremely time consuming and difficult. Ezines can be a great way to build a customer base. However, Ezines can also get you a bad name if they are not created and distributed right. There have been many instances where Ezines have only caused frustration with more customers ending up hitting the unsubscribe button. You wouldn’t want this for your Ezine. The sole purpose of Ezines is to increase customers not to decrease them. Unforgiving customers are extremely less tolerant about poor design and administration of ezines. Besides, the subscription process is absolutely crucial when it comes to new customers. It is imperative that you adopt the safest and the most credible subscription option. How many times have you found yourself being subscribed to unwanted newsletters only because you clicked a single button? Marketers of such a strategy may boast of a rapid increase in the number of subscribers – but only temporarily. Such an approach may backfire easily and I would not be surprised if the number of un-subscriptions is far greater than the number of subscriptions over a period of time. This is where the Double Opt in subscription method comes in. As compared to Single Opt in wherein users are subscribed to a newsletter with a single click, double opt in is far more credible and effective. With Double Opt in subscribers are not enrolled until they confirm the subscription by means of a reply to a confirmation Email or message. Thus, only genuine readers would subscribe to your Ezine. Like every marketing tactic, Double Opt-in also has a few critics. Some say that readers may not confirm the subscription request and eventually you would end up losing prospective customers. However, the chances of something like this happening are far remote compared to the number of un-subscription requests with a Single Opt in strategy. The bottom line is that with Double Opt in, you have a better chance of roping in targeted readers who are truly interested in your products. It gives you a high number of potential customers. Isn’t this exactly what you expect from your Ezine campaign? And if you are still not convinced, here are some more reasons to have a Double Opt-in subscription process. Double Opt-in may reduce the number of subscriptions; however, it certainly increases the prospect of targeting only receptive and interested readers Double Opt-in increases the credibility and trustworthiness of your Ezine. It portrays professionalism and reliability Higher credibility ensures long term relationship with potential customers It opens up other avenues such as marketing your Ezine to other publishers and advertisers Provides documented proof of subscription, thus eliminating false claims by readers that they were illegitimately subscribed to your ezine Save yourself time and money otherwise spent handling complaints and even legal claims from angry subscribers ISSN as most of you would have guessed by now is similar to the ISBN for books. ISSN or International Standard Serial Number is an 8 digit unique number given to Ezines. This number is especially useful if you wish to submit your Ezines to reputed libraries (online or offline) worldwide. Like the ISBN, having an ISSN would unique identify your Ezine. However, there are certain guidelines that have to be followed in order to apply and subsequently get an ISSN. Firstly, you should depict an intention of continuing with your ezine publication regularly and indefinitely. You may not get an ISSN if your Ezine is only going to be published for a short period. Secondly, each issue of an Ezine must be uniquely identified by a number in addition to the ISSN. For instance, the Ezine for the month of October in 2003 could be identified as 102003 or something of this sort. You could also associate a unique number considering some other factor. The key is to have a unique designation for each issue of the Ezine. The advantages of having an ISSN are very similar to having an ISBN for an eBook. One of the biggest advantages is that ISSN would boost the credibility of your Ezine. An Ezine with an ISSN would be seen as much more professional when compared to an Ezine without one. Besides, you only get an ISSN if you have been publishing one for long and intend to do so even in the future. This also augments to the credibility factor. Another advantage is that copyright violations can be addressed easily if you have an ISSN. Applying for an ISSN is quick, simple and above all free of cost. The following sites can be accessed to apply for an ISSN. They also provide a load of other information related to ISSN. The US Library of Congress - http://lcweb.loc.gov/issn/ (For North America Residents) The ISSN organization – http://www.issn.org/ (For all other countries) It is very likely that your Ezines are created with an objective of promoting some of your products. It makes sense then to have a user friendly website that provides all information about your ezines as well as other products. Your website must take a very unique approach. Although, you may not design a very elaborate site, it still has to be designed for success. First and foremost, it has to be functional. It should at least have a separate page that houses all your ezines along with a listing of all benefits that a potential customer might incur by signing up for these ezines. This section discusses in brief some of the basics of website designing and hosting. These basics hold true for all kinds of websites. Thus, you could follow these even if you intend to create a website to promote other products and not necessarily newsletters. However, I would strongly recommend that you have a separate web page for your ezines on your website that can serve as a convenient place to get information as well as sign up for them. Every time a reader succeeds in executing a task on the web site, your reputation is enhanced. Every time a reader is frustrated by the site, your reputation is diminished. Tools and approaches that make marketers and advertisers succeed offline are often drawbacks on the web. The compelling image is slow to download and frustrates the impatient scan reader. The catch phrase is of little use to a reader hungry for information, which is especially true in the case of newsletters. The conception about flashy homepages has changed. When you arrive on a home page and are met with a fancy Flash intro, you are no longer impressed. Waiting for a large image to download, your frustration would grow. Your potential customers visit your website looking for something unique and important. Anything that slows them down is an annoyance. You should portray your Ezines and other products that are promoted through these ezines with accurate, well-written, up-to-date content. Many marketers and advertisers still don't understand the web. The key is to make your website as content rich as possible. Make it as simple as possible. If I were to list out 2 things that are an absolute requirement for your website, they would be Simple, clean, a very user-friendly design Reliable host and domain name Let us first look at some of the aspects of designing a website. Build It for Speed It's a fact of modern life - people are in a hurry. This means that you have between 10 and 30 seconds to capture your potential customer's attention. To minimize your load time, keep graphics small. Compress them where possible. Use flashy technology (JavaScript, Flash, Streaming Audio/Video, animation) sparingly and only if it is important to your presentation.
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Browse Site3. Invite Guest Writers to Write in Your Ezine 5. Free Resources on Writing Skills 6. Write Attractive Descriptions 8. Free Hosts – a Definite No No 10. Suggest the Change Subtly to Your Readers 11. Creating a Comprehensive Online Media Kit 13. Always Look for Opt in Ezines 14. Auto Responder Improvements |
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