The Word Wrangler

Businesses in the offline world use newsletters to keep in touch with their patrons, build awareness of new products and services and to attract new business.

Because of the Internet’s ability to deliver timely information in an instant, more and more businesses - both on and offline - are using web based newsletters and e-zines to reach out to current and potential customers.

But Why Not Stick With Print?

The declaration made years ago that ‘print is dead’ was a bit premature. It’s not dead, but merely on life support. The obvious reason many businesses are turning to digital distribution of their marketing materials is cost.

Print is terribly expensive – even if you’re just producing a 1 color newsletter on a standard letter sized sheet. There are printing costs, possible typesetting costs, folding costs and mailing costs. And it all adds up.

Going digital means the elimination of much of the expense of putting out a newsletter on a frequent basis.

Another benefit for electronic distribution is timliness of information. With print, there’s a significant amount of time between the writing of the information you want your customers to get and the time it actually arrives in their mailboxes.

An online newsletter can be put together and ‘out the door’ in a few hours, which means that any timely information is still relevant when it reaches the subscribers.

In addition laying out a newsletter for online publishing isn’t quite as complicated as it is for print. You don’t have to worry about things like bleeds, color separations and screen percentages.

So, now that we’ve established that digital is the way to go, let’s take a look what methods are commonly used to distribute online newsletters and e-zines and the pros and cons of each.

E-mail

Distribution through e-mail has several benefits to the business owner. The main one is that it gives businesses the opportunity to capture e-mail addresses. This helps them in their future marketing efforts by giving them an audience – already familiar with the business- that can be specifically targeted with new products or services.

There are 3 main ways to send a newsletter via e-mail – Plain text, HTML and attachment.

Plain text is easy to produce and doesn’t take up as much file space as an attachment. However, plain text isn’t very interesting to look at and isn’t very flexible when it comes to inserting hyperlinks or graphics.

Using HTML gives you more options when it comes to layout, graphics and links to products or important information. HTML newsletters can be set up like print newsletters and are usually easier to read than straight text. The downside of HTML is that, unless you know what you’re doing when it comes to coding, you can end up with a real mess.

Attachments like PDF files are less common because many SPAM filters tend to block or throw e-mails with attachments into the trash. So you’re better off sticking with either plain text or HTML.

Web Page

Putting your newsletter directly on your web page has a few important advantages over the e-mail. The first is that the newsletter can remain on the page for as long as you want, which gives that information virtually unlimited exposure. Another big advantage is that if information in one section becomes outdated, it can easily be changed to maintain the timeliness of the whole piece.

Also, web page based newsletters are more likely to be read because visitors can easily scan through the topics and read what interests them. Many e-mail newsletters get trashed before being read because people simply can’t tell if there’s worthwhile information simply by the subject line.

Remember: Your web site and online marketing materials say a lot about your business and can be the reason for your success or failure on the net.

Mike Sieber - The Word Wrangler