The questions revisited - Why are we publishing a newsletter?
part 3
Who is going to take charge of gathering the content and putting it together?
There has to be someone in charge of the newsletter. It is time consuming and often requires skills that do not exist in-house, it maybe, that you use a project leader/editor in-house and get the technical bits done outside. This really isn't one to be run by a committee. You need a focused, dynamic person leading the project.
Where is the circulation list coming from?
Spam is a real concern today. There is no quicker way to loose an existing or potential customer than by spamming them, and it doesn't end there. Legislation covering the spam issue has been introduced in many countries worldwide. However, much of the legislation is aimed at the indiscriminate spammer and with some care you can build lists from existing and potential customers.
Data protection is also an issue where subscription lists are concerned. To operate a circulation list a company should, in all probability, be registered with an appropriate national agency. Laws throughout Europe are broadly similar, but it is worth looking at local requirements. Splash! is registered with the Information Commissioner (under the Data Protection Act 1998) in the UK.
Trade shows offer a good opportunity to grow lists, but people should be made fully aware of why they are giving their email address and, ideally, would have indicated it on a card. Your website should be a good point to encourage people to subscribe FREE! to you newsletter.
It is also worth considering what information you want to hold on your circulation list, beyond a name, company, and email. It might well be worth recording country, language preference, HTML/text preference, even a market segment of some sort, which would allow distinct language or special interest versions of the newsletter.
Who will maintain the circulation list?
Almost as important as growing the list in the first place, list maintenance is a crucial element of a successful e-newsletter campaign. It can be automated, but some form of manual checking gives you pointers to what is happening with your subs list. It is important that unsubscribes should be clearly marked and that they don't get re-subscribed accidentally.
How often will it be published? How big should it be?
These two questions sit together naturally. As far as frequency is concerned, obviously a lot depends on three key parameters, what you have to say, tolerance of the reader and budget. It is probably fair to say that all three rule out a weekly newsletter. Equally if you only go twice a year then you have trouble engaging the reader, no matter how interesting the content.
We find that something between monthly and once every two months seems to work quite well. It is often enough that it isn't a total surprise when it drops in the inbox and you can run a theme across several issues without losing the sense, yet infrequent enough that it isn't seen as wall paper and isn't annoying. It can usually fit in with most budgets. Raise the frequency and unsubscribes rise quickly. Lower it and open rates drop.
Size is, as everyone knows, very important, but we are trying to capture reader's attention in a very busy world. The newsletter itself should have somewhere between 4 and 8 main stories and may or may not have some briefs for a side column. The bit the reader sees is a headline and 3 or 4 lines of text. It is important that the headline is catchy and the four lines give a real feeling for the full text. A small picture also helps.
For most newsletters the aim is to provide a taster, using headlines, pictures and a brief paragraph, for the main article. Links in via the headline or the descriptive paragraph take the reader through to the full article.
Should we use HTML or text
Simply HTML allows you to make the newsletter more like a printed one, including layout elements and pictures. While a text version certainly gets the message across it looks better as HTML. Most people are able to read HTML emails, and you can create a version that defaults to text if the HTML element is turned off. You could also give the readers the opportunity to decide which they prefer.
What's it going to cost?
The cost base is similar to a hard copy newsletter, minus the print and postage. All the other costs remain, content, pictures, layout, list maintenance all have to be accounted for. It will vary depending on who is writing the content, whether you have to buy in pictures, etc, but the costs are quantifiable.
However, an e-newsletter provides the opportunity to repurpose other collateral such as case studies, press releases and conference papers. Effectively reducing the cost of content and making the original work harder.
Where is the funding coming from?
Is this a sales cost, marketing cost, corporate cost or indeed and new cost altogether. While not a big problem in smaller companies, when the same project goes into larger companies strategies need to be in place to get all departments on board, to understand why they benefit from a newsletter and why they are paying a proportion of the cost.
Do we try to sell advertising?
Advertising is one way of recouping the costs of a newsletter, and it has been tried many times, particularly when hard copy newsletter/magazines were being produced. However, there are substantial downsides to this. There are costs involved in selling, managing and billing the advertising and potentially you are seen to be pinching valuable advertising revenue from existing trade magazines. We can see no advantages in trying to sell advertising for e-newsletters.
Is it realistically achievable?
An e-newsletter is achievable by most companies, perhaps the real question here is the one we started with. Does producing an e-newsletter benefit the company?