Does Your Newsletter Standout in a Crowd?
As e-newsletters become a more common method of reaching out
to customers and clients, the quantity of newsletters filling the email boxes of
your own customers is starting to increase. This makes the quality of the
newsletter you deliver even more important than ever before.
Make your
newsletter standout above the crowd and make it engaging and focused on your
customer’s interests so that they look forward to reading it each month. Your
newsletter service provider should be your partner in this endeavor. Think
about all the things you do to make and distribute a newsletter and then ask
your provider how they help to make all those things easier to do.
A Good Newsletter has Great Content!
At the core, a newsletter must deliver well-written and
informative information in a concise format. This is how your subscribers will
rate your newsletter and it will determine if they will read it again the next
time. Because the creation of good material is the hardest part of the process,
make sure your newsletter service provider provides the tools and resources
needed to manage, create, license, and obtain high-quality content. And, if
content is available, how much work does it take to get it formatted correctly
for your publication?
Personalize and Focus Your Efforts
The success of your newsletter in the long term will be
determined by its ability to retain existing customers and convert prospects
into new customers. To do this effectively, you should seek to address your
subscribers personally and provide content that matches closely to their
interests. A personal greeting (e.g., Dear Bob) grabs their attention and
timely, well-written articles keeps it.
A Checklist for Choosing The Best Solution
There are many elements to running a successful newsletter
program. When evaluating providers it is useful to compare them based on the
features they offer and how well they integrate these features together to
address the full life cycle of newsletter publishing. Use the checklist below
as a starting point for your evaluation.
Feature
|
YES/NO
|
Dynamic
Content
|
|
Content
Manager
|
|
Subscription
Management
|
|
Online
List Manipulation
|
|
Bounce
Management
|
|
Opt-out
Protection
|
|
Accepts Flash Content
|
|
Attachments
|
|
WYSIWYG
Layout Editor
|
|
Companion
Web Site
|
|
Custom
Domains
|
|
Issue
Archive
|
|
Surveys
|
|
Letters
to the Editor
|
|
Printer-Friendly
Version
|
|
Reader
Tracking Report
|
|
Popular
Articles Report
|
|
Download
Reports in Excel Format
|
|
Personalized
Messages
|
|
Content
Syndication
|
|
Content
Library
|
|
FREE
Articles
|
|
Multi-user
Collaboration
|
|
Upload
from Word
|
|
AOL 5.0
vs. 6.0 Detection
|
|
