“What About SPAM and Privacy Concerns?”

The hottest topic in email marketing today is SPAM. As corporations and Internet Service Providers (ISPs) work to control the amount of unsolicited email entering their systems, they may inadvertently filter out legitimate emails, including some ENewsletters. In industry lingo, this type of error is known as a “false positive,” and the result is that some emails sent to people who have requested them don’t ever reach their destination.
But, let’s put that into perspective. Even with SPAM’s impact, a good E-Newsletter sent to your house list will stil be opened by over 40% of the people it’s sent to. Given typical response rates to traditional marketing tactics, that’s as much as 40 times better than the percentage of people who read your newspaper ads; respond to your direct mail; or return your unsolicited phone calls.
The fact is, for the small business owner, an E-Newsletter represents the first time in history that we’ve ever been able to cost effectively communicate with our entire customer and prospect base over and over and over again. Not only that, but thanks to the inherently democratic nature of email (i.e. the big boys don’t get any more space in the email inbox than the rest of us), an E-Newsletter gives us the opportunity to not just compete with, but outperform our much larger competitors for the attention of readers.
And so, while SPAM has certainly reduced some of the effectiveness of E-Newsletters in recent months, this remarkable tool is by no means past its prime.

“What is an E-Newsletter ”

“What is an E-Newsletter ”
Why We Believe You Need an E-Newsletter for Your Company


If you use email on a regular basis, you’re probably already receiving E-Newsletters
from some of the companies you do business with. And while there’s a tremendous
amount of variation out there regarding what constitutes an E-Newsletter (or
“electronic newsletter” or “E-zine” or “email newsletter;” they’re all the same thing),
they do have certain elements in common.

First and foremost, E-Newsletters arrive in your inbox as email messages. The
sending company writes the newsletter, drops it into a predetermined email format,
and sends it to a list of people who receive it on the other end. There’s a fair
amount of technology that runs in the background to do this efficiently and
effectively, but when you boil it al down, it’s just an email sent to many people at
once.

To dig a bit deeper, think of an E-Newsletter like an electronic magazine, with three
principal pieces:

1. Content. The words themselves - what you write and how you write it.

2. Formatting and Layout. Like a magazine, an E-Newsletter has a consistent
look from month to month for organizing and laying out the content. Fonts,
graphics, sections, headings, links, etc., al come together to create the
design and layout.

3. Delivery and List Management. Once the newsletter is assembled
(content + layout), there needs to be a “machine” for sending it out to a
predetermined list of people (your subscribers). The machine takes care of
the logistics behind delivery. In addition to sending the newsletter out, that
includes things like adding/removing names; managing bounced emails;
sending automated messages to readers as they come on the list or make
changes to their personal information; and collecting and reporting on data
regarding reader behavior and preferences.

Taken together, these three elements make up an E-Newsletter.

Join us next month as we get back to publicity tips, and talk about one of the best ways to connect with existing customers and encourage new ones – E-Newsletters.