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Direct to Consumer Brand Discovery

  Online Marketing Whitepaper
 

Online Marketing Whitepaper

Introduction

The Imperfect World of Quantifying Website Traffic

Online Advertising Lingo

Necessities for Every Company with a Website

Paid Advertising

Leveraging the True Power of the Internet

Bootstrap Marketing Online

 

A Dated Introduction to Online Marketing*

*Note: This is the original version of a whitepaper that was authored in 2001 by iCondotta's founder and principal consultant, Stephan Aarstol. It's a useful primer, but dated - pre-Wikipedia (2001), pre-Google AdWords PPC (2002), way pre-YouTube (2005), you get the picture...

Publishing an Email Newsletter

In contrast to an email discussion group, which leverages the interactive nature of the Internet, an email newsletter is purely a broadcast medium. Nonetheless, they are very efficient and cost effective communication tools that open up a communication channel with potential customers. Email newsletters typically have a specific delivery schedule. They can be thought of as the online version of a daily or weekly paper, magazine, or journal.

If your company can provide content that is of interest to people, starting your own newsletter is a powerful and inexpensive broadcast marketing tool. The content you can provide may be more appealing that you think, even if it’s overtly commercial. Consider offline catalogs from companies like Nordstrom. Lots of people actually look forward to receiving these strictly commercial catalogs in their mailbox every so often. Email newsletters can address similar consumer needs.

There are numerous options for handling the email management and distribution of an email newsletter. Determining the content to include and the structure for a newsletter is something every company has to figure out for itself. Here are some generally accepted guidelines and tips to keep in mind:

  • HTML newsletters outperform plain-text newsletters in terms of click-thrus. The downside is that it is likely that a small percentage of your recipient list will not be able to view HTML emails because of an insufficient email client, so you will have to either create a separate plain-text version for these users or risk alienating them.
  • Regularly recurring newsletters will get opened by a larger percentage of your subscriber list if the email subject line is personalized in one form or another. Something as simple as including the current date in each newsletter’s subject line can increase the percentage of newsletters that get opened.
  • The objective of an email newsletter can go way beyond simply broadcasting information. By incorporating a large number of relevant links into an email newsletter, you create a doorway into your site from within each recipient’s mailbox.
  • Integrating interactive features into an email newsletter enhances the recipient’s experience. Two popular interactive features include: having a customer feedback mechanism, and including polls of interest in one issue with the results in the following issue.

>> Email Marketing to Existing Customers

Authored in 2001 by Stephan Aarstol
while Director of Business Development
at AuntMinnie.com