Email Newsletters: Different Strokes for Different Folks

Some of us enjoy receiving email and some of us consider it an annoyance. But regardless of whether or not we like it, email marketing is here to stay. According to a recent benchmark study by Marketing Sherpa (http://www.marketingsherpa.com/), email marketing has the highest ROI of any direct marketing technique.

Email (electronic) newsletters are being used by more and more businesses to keep in touch with their customers and prospects, and there are several types of email newsletters.

Dynamic email newsletters can be customized to the preferences or demographics of each recipient. After opting in for the newsletters, recipients receive email messages that provide a list of topics and allow them to select any or all of those topics that are of interest. Their newsletters are populated with articles about those topics. At any time, the recipients can change their preferences and can unsubscribe to the newsletter.

Non-dynamic email newsletters can be customized but to a lesser extent. You can have different versions for various types of recipients (e.g. clients, prospects, vendors, employees). While each group receives a version designed specifically for it, all group members receive the same articles.

Email versions of print newsletters can be sent via email and/or placed on a website where visitors can view or download it. While this may seem to be merely a duplication of effort, different people prefer different methods of delivery. The same people who read the print version may not read the email version and vice versa.

Mini email newsletters or articles consist of one or possibly two articles which can be informational or promotional. Just as non-dynamic newsletters, you can have more than one version, but each group of recipients gets the same version.

Why should you use email newsletters? Here are some of the benefits:

1. Their costs are lower than those of print newsletters.
2. They provide real-time reporting statistics (delivery, open, clickthrough
and bounce rates).
3. Working with your web monitoring software, they can track conversions.
4. Email newsletters can drive traffic to a website.
5. A library of articles from the newsletter can be made available on the
website.
6. You can easily forward them to friends or colleagues.

Whose Web Page Is It Anyhow?

Have you ever wondered whether anyone else is using your website material for their own purposes? Or whether your web writer(s) have used any verbiage from someone else’s web page? With all of the information available on the Internet and the millions of web pages available for public view, finding violations of copyright and enforcing them may be difficult.

From time to time, I have found plagiarism on the Internet and I’m sure that there are many undiscovered examples. Last year, I decided to compare the website content that I developed for a previous employer to other web pages. I was surprised when I found that a page on another company’s website was exactly the same as mine with one exception. I mentioned the name of my employer, and the other company substituted the word, “we” for a company name.

You, too, can find out whether your web content has been copied. Just go the http://www.copyscape.com/ and enter the url of any web page that you want to compare. This is the free version and it will return a limited number of similar pages but includes those that are most similar or even identical.

If you do find another web page that is suspiciously like yours, the date of publication on the web becomes important. You can find out approximately when pages were uploaded or changed at the Internet Wayback Machine at www.archive.org/index.php. After you enter the url of the page(s) involved, you will be given the dates that changes were made to that page.

As you can see, it’s easy to use material from one page on another, but it’s also easy to get caught.