Newsletters

[WyethDigital]

Hi all,

We're considering starting a newsletter as a companion to our show, and we were wondering the pros and cons of distribution via an emailing list; or as a PDF via an RSS feed.

I see a lot of chatter about how email lists are valuable, but since we don't care to sell our information or abuse our subscriber's patience by sending out a bunch of extra crap, and we're concerned about the privacy of our audience (a lot of teens use our site), I have to ask what would make such a database worth the effort of compiling and maintaining it?

Anyone with experience in this area is definitely encouraged to share their thoughts!

And if you don't have experience, but just want to chime in or offer some insight, then I also would say to speak up! We want this to be a valuable part of the website.

Eric

[Rasheed]

I have no experience, but I have these publications to share:
The Changing Face of Email Newsletter Publishing: Tips for Newsletter Publisher (http://www.thesitewizard.com/ezines/newsletterpublishingtips.shtml)
The Seven Deadly Sins of Email Marketing Management (http://www.digital-web.com/articles/seven_sins_of_email_marketing/)Basically, you're opening a whole can of worms of you pick the email route. And to top it off, some ISPs will block your outgoing email if you send more than a certain amount of email traffic per hour through their mail servers. Other ISPs will block incoming bulk email traffic if you're not a certified (i.e. paying) mail provider. And what is "bulk email"? That's up to the ISPs (and software filters on their mail servers) to decide.

I don't want to discourage you, but just to point you to the problems you might encounter if you decide to send newsletters via email. Subscription via RSS is far less complicated at this moment, although subscribers may beg to differ.

[Yotto]

Hi all,

We're considering starting a newsletter as a companion to our show, and we were wondering the pros and cons of distribution via an emailing list; or as a PDF via an RSS feed.
...
And if you don't have experience, but just want to chime in or offer some insight, then I also would say to speak up! We want this to be a valuable part of the website.

Eric

I fall into that last category there :)

Considering your target audience (Teenagers to young adults) are you sure PDF is the way to go? I'd seriously consider a blog with an open RSS feed, so your readers can go to your page or subscribe via their favorite RSS reader. You don't have complete control over the look (But with CSS you have a lot of control) like you would with a PDF, but I think you'd get more readers. I know for a fact that I've stopped reading 2 (the only 2 I was ever subcribed to) "PDF Newsletters" because they were a pain to read. Were they blogs, I may still be subscribed.

But, I'm not a teenager. :)

[DailySplice]

We went through this with a past show I was involved with. We had collected tens of thousands emails by that point from listeners who had come back and registered on the site. I did a lot of looking into our options and decided HTML email was the way to go, and it worked for us very nicely. We went with a service called MailChimp (http://www.mailchimp.com/index.phtml). Although I wasn't the one who implemented, the girl who did seemed to get along pretty easily with it and reported great statistics. I think the number of people who opted to turn off future emails was below 1%, and the clickthrough rate was through the roof (although I can't remember what it was exactly). Needless to say, we continued with it.

The thing you've got to think about is how you've gone about gathering your email addresses? Have you been asking permission to send email either explicitly with a check box, or in your privacy policy? How have you worded it? If you've not thought about it, what wording do you need to tweak and where to make sure you have handled the privacy issue going forward?

What's proper is obvious... what's ethical is grey. When we did it we looked at this carefully and went ahead with it (with some enhancements to the wording of our policies of course.) To my knowledge we got 0 complaints, and as I said, less than 1% opted out after the fact. Remember, if someone has subscribed to your show, they've already told you the like you and want you to send them stuff, so you probably wont have to deal with the same kinds of complaints that some of the other kinds of services deal with.

In terms of the email campaign strategy, it's been a while since I was researching it, but I remember when I did I got the most helpful tips from Clickz (http://www.clickz.com/).

Anyway, that's my experience with the it... hope it helps.

[WyethDigital]

All good points. We haven't actually compiled an email list. Our privacy policy pretty much states that everything is opt-in. I don't really see a grey area in there.

Thinking about Yotto's suggestion about a blog, I think you make some good points. Since ours is DiY show, we thought a PDF would be more printer-friendly than a blog (or HTML email) for people who wanted to print out tips and instructions; but our site is being redesigned on a blog platform. Hmmm. I'll have to give the blog idea some more thought.

Of course, I know squat about CSS (and do pretty well with Acrobat), and the logistics of an emailed newsletter sound about as nightmarish as I dreamed... But still, I'd hate to discount all of that out of hand. There's a lot of great links to peruse, so I think I'll get cracking. Thanks Rasheed for the insight and the awesome links. Thanks for your links, too, DailySplice. The HTML email does sound attractive on some level - but then so does a RSS delivery!

Eric

[Books on the Nightstand]

I was talking about something similar with a customer at my "day job." Here's my opinion (and it's just my opinion).

Email newsletters limit you in a lot of ways. For one thing, you can't really send multiple emails in a day/week or risk being thought of as "spam". And just because someone receives your email, it's no guarantee that you will read it. Yes, you will have "control" of your subscriber base if, say, a server blows up and you can't reconstruct the same RSS feed.

With a blog platform, you can post multiple times per day/week/month, etc., and because the reader is getting it on his/her schedule, it's not spam -- it's a service. If you thing a pdf would be helpful, take a look at http://www.scribd.com/ - you can embed a pdf right into your blog post so that people can either read it online or download/print.

The biggest stumbling block for blogs vs. email is educating your users in how to subscribe. This is something that we are struggling with. Most of our readers/listeners have zero experience with blogs and/or podcasts. So we are working very hard to try and instruct them in the use of bloglines or googlereader, and itunes -- because those are the most mainstream. It's still a struggle though. So I'd say that's the tradeoff.

Good luck!

Ann

[DailySplice]

It depends what your trying to accomplish. Blog campaigns and email campaigns are not the same. And I thought you already had a blog? Or is that someone else's? the beanbagchair one? Sorry, I'm not a tween girl so I'll admit I don't know your site as well as I should.

Anyway, if your objective is to build search traffic, plant link bait, build branding, solicit feedback, or increase your returning traffic... by all means a blog can do you a lot of good.

But if you've got some kind of specific call to action (say you want them to buy a t-shirt or resubscribe after becoming inactive), I'll argue from experience that you'll get a lot more new response off an emailed newsletter than a blog.

Also, if you're thinking about blogging, I'm a huge advocate of WordPress. You can find a plugin for almost anything, including making your posts printer friendly...

[WyethDigital]

It depends what your trying to accomplish. Blog campaigns and email campaigns are not the same. And I thought you already had a blog? Or is that someone else's? the beanbagchair one? Sorry, I'm not a tween girl so I'll admit I don't know your site as well as I should.

Actually, The Beanbag chair is Madeline's personal blog. We began our podcast using an out-of-the box offline WYSIWYG web builder because it was super easy, solid, and allowed us to spend more time creating the show. However, it is becoming cumbersome and limiting to the things we'd like to do. Linking to Madeline's blog was a shortcut for her to pass along time-sensitive info to the audience without having to edit and upload a whole site. That's the "how." Or more specifically, the "how come?"

The "why" is more philosophical. We both envision our podcast website and brand as sort of a new media presentation that takes the most dynamic elements of TV and magazines and combines them with the community building power of the internet. We've got the TV angle covered (a fairly loyal and large video audience, episodic content, etc), and we've got a website layout that brings to mind a print magazine; but because our platform is limited we're lacking the functionality we want, and efforts have become scattered. We want to pull it all together under one masthead and give it more of a professional polish (Madi knows her BeanBag Chair blog is kind of a -- um -- mess).

We want the newsletter to be part of our new master plan, but we're still discussing the content we would put into it, and how often it will come out. Talking about it at this early stage makes me think I'm putting the cart before the horse, but I also think that knowing ahead of time what we're getting into will help us determine how ambitious we're willing to be.


Eric

[Yotto]

Why get the horse until you're sure what kind of cart you're going to have?

:)

More seriously (I say that a lot don't I? But anyway) you've determined you need something and figuring out what exactly that is before you jump in and start doing it seems pretty smart to me.

[DailySplice]

If you haven't looked closely at WordPress, I'd strongly recommend you do. It sounds like the perfect solution for you. You could literally have it up and running in a day and have your site (blog, podcast, and pages) under one roof. You could easily find a theme that makes it look like a magazine and have it installed in 2 minutes. It so happens that I got a great episode about wordpress in my splice this morning.

Here it is:

http://dailysplice.com/Small-Business-Trends-Radio-Small-Business-Information-podcast/episode-147862
(http://dailysplice.com/Small-Business-Trends-Radio-Small-Business-Information-podcast/episode-147862)
fast forward the first 9 minutes because they have a bunch of technical difficulties, but if you don't know much about wordpress you can't miss the rest of this one. This episode covers everything I would have written here for you, so it's kind of convenient that I stumbled across it this morning as I was reading your post. haha:) It talks about building your site with wordpress, themes, and covers all the best plugins. BTW: SBT Radio (http://www.smbtrendwire.com/2008/05/07/easy-small-biz-websites/) is a great podcast, I highly recommend subscribing (or adding it to your splice (http://dailysplice.com/Small-Business-Trends-Radio-Small-Business-Information-podcast) of course!)

[WyethDigital]

If you haven't looked closely at WordPress, I'd strongly recommend you do.
As noted in a previous post of mine, we ARE rebuilding our site using WordPress.

Eric

[DailySplice]

Oh, sorry, I didnt see that one, I must have tunnel vision. Good job, you can ignore my ramblings then. But do check out the episode from SBT anyway, even as someone who knows a lot about wp can pick up a lot of cool tips from that one. I did.

[WyethDigital]

Oh, sorry, I didnt see that one, I must have tunnel vision. Good job, you can ignore my ramblings then. But do check out the episode from SBT anyway, even as someone who knows a lot about wp can pick up a lot of cool tips from that one. I did.

That's alright. It's in a longer post, so not easily seen.

Eric