Shrewd electronic marketers have figured out a way to implement e-mail in a non-objectionable format that reaches target individuals on a regu-lar basis. It is called the e-mail newsletter. The e-mail newsletter (Fig-ures 4.1 and 4.2) is basically a long e-mail that is regularly and automatically sent to a customer or prospect by subscription—upon request. The best e-mail newsletters contain information of high per-ceived value about a pertinent topic area, but they are, of course, mar-keting vehicles as well. Although most are free, some e-mail newsletters are sent on a paid subscription basis.
E-mail newsletters are hugely popular. They have become the ac-ceptable method for using e-mail as an ongoing form of promotional communication. For example, every major high-tech information pro-vider—including CMP (techweb.cmp.com), C|Net (www.cnet.com), IDG (www.idg.net), and Ziff-Davis (www.zdnet.com)—publishes a variety of free e-mail newsletters, some on a daily basis. Reportedly, some of the more popular e-mail newsletters have circulations as high as a mil-lion subscribers.
Figure 4.1. A typical text-only e-mail newsletter from Internet.com.
That is only the tip of the e-mail newsletter iceberg. Now e-mail newsletters have pervaded every business and industry. E-mail newslet-ters have proliferated to the extent that there are likely to be many to choose from in even the narrowest of interest groups, and the majority of these newsletters are free. An increasing number of marketing Web sites offer free newsletters as part of their promotional strategy.
Why do organizations and individuals distribute these free e-mail news-letters so widely? For one thing, it keeps their names in front of a very large number of people, all of whom have given the information provid-ers their e-mail addresses. As a result, they are building their own opt-in e-mailing lists for free, and the e-mail addresses they acquire will be avail-able to them for ongoing use. The cost to e-mail to these names is very low. Compared with the cost of other promotional means of reaching prospects, e-mail is downright cheap. Newsletters are, in effect, one of the best ways to build your own house list of e-mail prospects.
Figure 4.2. This daily HTML e-mail newsletter from eMarketer adds graph-ics to spice up the statistgraph-ics.
Publishing an e-mail newsletter and collecting subscriber names is a smart business strategy. As the regulatory environment changes, unso-licited e-mail has become either unethical or illegal. Even opt-in lists are not completely foolproof. As an e-mail newsletter publisher, however, you are building your own e-mail list. You can continue to use it to send e-mail ethically and legally, because the recipients have asked for it. Of course, it is still good practice to offer e-mail newsletter subscribers the option of deleting their names from your list.
There are other benefits to publishing e-mail newsletters. As an e-mail newsletter publisher, you are constantly promoting yourself. Many e-mail newsletters drive subscribers back to linked Web pages to learn more about a particular topic. E-mail newsletters can be distributed at a very low cost. Imagine the cost for printing and postage to send a million paper newsletters. Even if they were simple one-page documents sent by fax, the newsletter publisher would have to pay to call every recipient’s fax machine.
E-mail, on the other hand, can be broadcast across the Internet via automated methods at a very low cost. As long as you have the proper e-mail addresses and the necessary software and systems support, you can send e-mail to hundreds, thousands, or even millions of individuals instantly. In fact, with advanced database-driven technology, you can personalize and customize e-mail newsletters. E-mail newsletters can include an individual’s name, and, more important, you can even tailor e-mail newsletters to the needs of individual target audiences. Some e-mail newsletters even customize information within the newsletter itself to specific audiences.
As e-mail newsletters have become popular, services have been in-troduced to help marketers with the publishing and distribution pro-cess. IMakeNews (www.imakenews.com) automates the e-newsletter publishing process. Topica (www.topica.com) provides an integrated suite of services to help marketers of high-volume newsletters create and distribute them.
Most e-mail newsletters are published in text, but a growing num-ber are published as HTML newsletters so that the graphic look and feel can be enhanced. HTML versions of e-mail newsletters might offer additional opportunities for advertising sponsorships. The HTML news-letter can be sent as an HTML e-mail or posted on the Web and linked via a hyperlink in the text e-mail. If you send an HTML e-mail newslet-ter, prepare a default text version and use an e-mail distribution service that can detect whether recipients can receive HTML.
A common e-mail newsletter technique is to publish article summa-ries in newsletter form and then post the full articles on a Web site. The newsletter summaries then link the reader directly to the article pages.
One such marketing newsletter, ClickZ (www.clickz.com), part of the Internet.com network, is a combination e-mail newsletter and Web site.
ClickZ provides online marketing information and uses e-mail notifica-tions to its subscribers with links to each of its articles, which are then published as HTML pages. Advertisers sponsor several of the recurring columns. ClickZ cleverly ties in the column to the sponsor by utilizing the advertiser’s logo and corporate color to brand the information. ClickZ publishes articles, hosts online discussion forums, offers marketing guides, and sponsors live conferences about online and e-mail marketing.
Most e-mail newsletters are designed to drive traffic, but they can be revenue generators in and of themselves. Many of the larger-circula-tion e-mail newsletters are also important vehicles for Internet-based advertising. Some e-mail newsletter publishers accept paid advertising messages and append them to the newsletter text. The advertiser is of-ten positioned as a sponsor of the newsletter and can embed a live link to a Web site in the promotional message. Most e-mail programs accept Web links, so this can be a very effective way of driving a target pros-pect directly to a specific URL.
Advertising in e-mail text newsletters may not be fancy, but indus-try sources say it is very effective. My direct and e-marketing agency has extensively tested e-mail newsletter ads against outbound e-mail and banner ads. The newsletter ads have consistently outpulled both opt-in e-mail and banner ads for qualified lead generation. I have seen numerous industry reports supporting this. E-mail newsletter advertis-ing is such a significant business that now Internet advertisadvertis-ing networks and service providers are working them into their offerings.
There is a logical reason why advertising in e-mail newsletters works.
Newsletter subscribers are looking for high-value content, and they have requested the newsletter. Chances are the subscribers are reading each issue closely. Text-based ads are generally placed within the body of the newsletter. Although they are separated from the text itself, the reader can’t miss them. If the ads embed Web page links, all the reader has to do is click to go to the advertiser’s Web page. It’s simple, effective direct marketing…and it works.
Before we leave the subject of newsletters, it’s worth mentioning that customer e-mail newsletters can be quite effective in developing ongoing relationships. In the Winter 2001 issue of The DMA
In-sider, published by the Direct Marketing Association, it was reported that Hewlett-Packard employed e-mail newsletters to reach three dif-ferent customer audiences, each with targeted messages. HP inte-grated Call Me Now buttons within the newsletter and achieved a 12% through rate. What’s more, they’ve achieved a click-through rate of from 25 to 40% when e-mails have been forwarded to colleagues of the recipients.
By the way, I consider e-mail marketing newsletters among my top sources for information about Internet marketing. I’ve listed several of my favorites in Appendix A.