E-zines - how to get the most out of them22 June 2005
One of the main challenges faced by online businesses is marketing. Getting users to visit your website is a never ending challenge that has to be met in order to succeed. One of the great weapons in the e-marketers toolkit is e-zines. So what is an e-zine and how can it benefit your website?
An e-zine is an electronic magazine delivered by email to subscribers who choose to "opt in" to the service. Usually published monthly or fortnightly, e-zines are a great way to market your website and products and add value and interest to your online offerings. As they're targeted to subscribers you can be sure that readers are at least mildly interested in what you have to say.
Here are few tips on creating e-zines to ensure maximum effectiveness and boost your number of visitors.
Choose a format
The first decision in creating an e-zine is whether to publish in HTML or text format. Text has the advantage that it can be read by an email system and is viewable offline. It is also quick loading so will be popular with those who have slow dial-up connections.
HTML offers more freedom. Backgrounds, images, multimedia and even sounds can be included helping your e-zine stand out, look good and look professional. It also allows an embedded tool to be included to allow you to check when it is actually being read.
Decide on an achievable frequency
There's no point launching a weekly e-zine only to run out of time or ideas after a month. It's better to start off publishing less often, say monthly or bi-monthly, then if you do have plenty of good ideas for content you can increase the frequency of publication at a later date.
Consider the content
As you are relying on subscribers to choose to receive and read your e-zine it is vital that the content you supply is well written, well researched and most importantly of interest to your target audience. For this reason a monthly e-zine that is well written and on target is much better than a weekly e-zine that's just satisfying a quota. Poor e-zines go straight in to the recycle bin and subscribers opt-out.
Make subscription easy
Modern life on the Internet bombards us with a plethora of forms. Nobody enjoys filling in reams of personal details and increasingly feel wary from a privacy point of view. The chances are you will never send anything to subscribers through the post, never phone them and never need to know their hat size. Keep subscription forms to the bare minimum - name and email address are often all that's required. Making it easy to unsubscribe will also be appreciated.
Don't be Spam
After all the hard work spent producing an e-zine the last thing you want to happen is that your email goes straight to the spam folder. This usually happens because too many words or phrases have been used that the spam software doesn't like. One way to avoid this is to use a program such as SpamCheck which rates your e-zine to see how likely it is that it will be treated as spam, and shows you the areas that need attention.
