E-Mail Newsletter Marketing Essentials

If Gutenberg were alive today he would be in publishing
heaven! Forget the printing press, the web has fast-forwarded
self-publishing in ways that are evolving so rapidly it's
becoming difficult to integrate technology and process to
leverage the opportunities. Any company, regardless of their
size and marketing resources should be publishing an opt-in
e-mail newsletter - it's a very low cost way to build community
with customers, keep suppliers/partners/other informed and
generate new business.

How do you get started? You must decide up front if you have
the marketing expertise to develop your "newsletter creative"
in-house and how you want to manage the distribution of your
newsletters. Many companies turn to agencies/marketing services
firms to help them develop the actual newsletter creative and
also outsource part of the process to ASP (Application Service
Providers), who handle all facets of the list distribution,
signup and ongoing management.

Content format can be critical to the effectiveness of your
newsletter - we typically don't recommend HTML (text with
images/graphics embedded) format unless our client's product
or service is very consumer-focused. Plain old text is not as
glamorous as HTML but it's a lot more effective in most cases -
people want information, not fancy eye candy that's appealing
to marketing geeks - keep your message, simple, to the point
and with customer success stories or references when/where you
can to drive credibility.

It's relatively simple to use a Word processor with a mail
merge program to integrate the addresses (depending on the
volume) with your message and then send out via your ISP. But,
doing it in house can be very time consuming - you have to deal
with inbound requests for people who want to be added to your
list,  "unsubscribes" (people who want to be deleted) and
integrate your web site into the process, so people can
automatically sign up with a back end auto-responder
(automatic message) that confirms their sign up.

Most companies utilize an Application Service Provider
("ASP") to outsource the list hosting, signup and unsubscribe
management processes and web site integration - typical costs
are under $50. per month based upon your number of subscribers
(on average up to 10-30K), frequency of your newsletter
mailing (rule of thumb would be 2-4 times per month) and other
specialized features, such as bounce back deletions (deleting
any e-mails that have a "bad address") and making the HTML
code available with a graphic to sign up people directly from
your web site.  Be forewarned, most list hosting providers
tell you up front they reserve the right to delete your account
if they catch you spamming thousands of people whose e-mail
addresses were not "opted in" (given to you with permission
to market to them).

What do you want to look for in an ASP List Hosting Provider?
You want great customer service, an online interface that
enables you to easily manage the process, the ability to
easily to cut and paste your text (newsletter copy), instant
distribution of your newsletter and the ability to know at a
glance how many subscribers you have on an ongoing basis and
the number of new subscribers and unsubscribers.

There are lots of list hosting companies out there - I'd
recommend including two on your short list. One of the oldest,
most well established companies that has consistently won rave
reviews for excellence in customer service is Sling Shot Media,
LLC www.listhost.net - they've been hosting since 1998 (ancient
in web time) and offer a wide range of consulting services
related to all aspects of newsletter marketing. The other
company to check out would be Microsoft's bCentral Services
www.bcentral.com which offers list hosting as one of its
services. I can't give them rave reviews for customer service,
as they make you pay extra for anything more than e-mail
support which can be a hassle at times. But, their list
hosting interface is easy to use, works well most of the
time and they are price competitive.

Finally, one of the biggest marketing challenges facing many
small to medium sized companies is generating a newsletter
subscriber list. I don't have sufficient space in this column
to address this challenge - but, it's a classic go/no go
situation; the longer you put it off the harder it becomes,
so get started, the upside rewards are too significant to
delay!

Lee Traupel has 20 plus years of business development and marketing experience - he is the founder of Intelective Communications, Inc. http://www.intelective.com, a marketing services and software company which provides strategic and tactical marketing services exclusively to small to medium sized companies. Lee@intelective.com Reprinted with permission from Intelective Communications - this article may be reprinted freely, providing this attribution box remains intact. (c) 2001-2002 by Intelective Communications, Inc.