10 Questions to Answer
before Launching an
e-Mail Newsletter
By Judith Broadhurst

Deciding whether launching a newsletter is really a good idea in your case is much like deciding whether to start a Web-based company or any other kind. But some of the most obvious things you'll need to research to make a wise decision are the most difficult to determine. Do not hit "send" until you've hit each and every one of these points:

1. Purpose What do you want the newsletter to accomplish, or what problem do you want it to help solve? Forrester Research says e-mail works better for cultivation and retention than acquisition of readers, clients or customers, members or whomever you want to attract.

"Marketing changes from hunting to herding," as they put it, because keeping in touch with your audience and developing brand-recognition are better reasons to publish a newsletter than trying to make direct connections between reading and acting. You may want just to inform people about something for reasons consistent with your organization's purpose. You may want to draw them to your Web site to do something else, such as participate in a discussion forum or to learn more about your services or products. Or you may want them to buy things through your Web site. What you want the newsletter to accomplish determines what kind of content you publish.

2. Audience Who, where and how large is your audience? Increasingly, segmentation of your potential market and content relevant to their specific interests will be critical to success. There's just too much information available and we're all too overloaded with it. So be sure you do enough research to know both how large your potential audience is, as well as how many individuals there are when you break it down into special interests, because a newsletter that is too general isn't likely to survive Volume 1, Issue 3.

Now, can you reach those people? How, without spamming? How do you know? Will you rent lists or trade lists with compatible companies? Do you plan to run banner, display or classified ads? The best answers are that:

• You already have a sizable in-house list that you've compiled over time from previous contacts with them, visitors to your Web site and other sources of your own, and
• They've all checked a box that invites you and gives you permission to send them information by e-mail from time to time.

If you take away only one message from this article, let it be this one: The very best place to start in launching a newsletter is to build a strong list of your own. Start now. Even if you decide against launching a newsletter, you know you'll be able to use your list.

3. Competition What similar newsletters are out there? What is their content like? How do they market their newsletters? How many subscribers do they have? Free or paid? Who's paying their bills? What will you do differently that will make people choose your newsletter instead or in addition to theirs? How long have they been publishing? Can you find out how many subscribers they have and anything about their open (reader opened the e-mail to read the newsletter), clickthrough (from the newsletter to your Web site) and unsubscribe rates?

As always, find out anything and everything you can about your potential competitors and continually monitor what they do. If there are no competitors or just one or two, those are not good signs. In the first case, it probably means there's not a real market for this kind of newsletter. In the second, it may mean there's only a limited market and someone else has already captured most of it.

4. Marketing What are you going to do to get new subscribers aside from wait patiently for people to discover your Web site and the "Subscribe to our newsletter" box you've placed prominently on your home page (or better yet, on every page of your site)? How will you cross-promote other services or products you offer? Will you advertise online? Where? In related but non-competing newsletters, on kindred Web sites? Will you advertise offline? Where, when, how and how often? Reminder: See Budget!

5. Content You must give your readers useful information and keep the promo to a minimum. What kind of content and editorial mix will you have and how many sections? Conventional wisdom in the paid subscription newsletter business says that how-to newsletters don't last and that the core of the most successful ones is news and analysis. Mostly, that's true. Yet it's also true that just about every magazine runs "service" articles, which are variations of how-to stories.

Those "soft features" may help people make strategic business decisions or decide whether to seek medical help, for instance. They're also similar to the shorter items frequently billed as "news you can use." It's important to have a mixture, though, and the key is finding what the balance should be. That's going to be trial-and-error and something you'll need to fine-tune over several issues. You won't really be able to decide until you get feedback from your readers after a few issues. But bear in mind that they usually aren't going to take time to tell you, even when you ask them to, and "unsubscribe" is feedback.

Start by developing a standard format of what kinds of content you'll run in each issue. The table of contents for any newspaper or magazine can guide you. The news or newsiest stories come first, less time-relevant or service stories in the middle, and just generally useful but shorter stuff is typically at the end. Then create an editorial calendar for the first six months worth of issues. Some would-be publishers hang it up after that step when they find out they've run out of ideas by the second issue.

6. Frequency Consistency is critical. The more often you publish, the more readers rely on you. It's vital that you publish regularly and, in the online realm, monthly at minimum. Anything from daily to weekly to twice-monthly or month works (quarterly rarely does), so decide based on the nature of your audience, your content and your resources.

Once you start publishing, the only real way to take a serious break is to stop publishing, period. Start missing issues and you start losing subscribers, and it's doubtful that you'll ever get them back.

7. Production What format will you use and how will you distribute it? Will you publish in text only, HTML only or both? On your Web site, too, or only by e-mail? ASCII text used to be the best alternative, because many people preferred its faster download time and many others choose not receive anything but plain text for virus protection. However, that has changed, and two-thirds or more of your subscribers will probably prefer the HTML format, because it's easier to read, once they know to expect it and that it's coming from a trusted source. HTML also has several advantages for you, according to Forrester Research:

• Clickthrough rates are at least double for HTML, often as much as five times higher.
• It's a more pleasant experience for most readers, which gives you a psychological advantage.
• HTML also shows off your company's name and branding better and makes it more memorable.
• HTML is the only way you can track whether people actually opened your newsletter and which stories they clicked through to read on your site.
• Advertisers prefer advertising in HTML newsletters not only because clickthrough rates are better, but because their ads simply look better.

Rich text, with basic formatting (such as bold text), but much like plain text, is another option. If you can offer them a choice of HTML or text or be sure that the service you use automatically converts from HTML to text if that's all the recipient allows, that's the best alternative.

Another vital consideration is what e-mail service your readers use. AOL, Hotmail and other popular services often block certain kinds of content (photos or graphics, for instance) or bulk e-mail in general, and spam filters can zap your e-mail entirely under certain conditions (for example, if you use "free" in the subject line when you send your newsletter).

8. Process Who's going to do what and by when? Although clickthroughs are roughly the same for do-it-yourselfers and companies that outsource at least delivery and list management, the ones that contract with pros to handle those tasks get nearly twice the response rate from e-mail (64% vs. 35%). If e-commerce is part of your site, take heed that they also get nearly five times the purchase rate from clickthroughs (6% vs. 1.4%) than publishers who handle everything in-house do. Caveat: See Budget.

Think through who is going to handle each of these phases:

Content: Writing, copyediting and proofreading. Staff, freelancers, both? Although there's no real "going rate," most US writers charge anywhere from $500 to $5000 per issue to research and write a newsletter, most copy editors charge the equivalent of $40 to $75 an hour, and good proofreaders typically charge around $25 per hour. Hourly rates are just a guideline, however, because accuracy and thoroughness are paramount, and experienced people will be faster.

Variation in rates depend on the length of the copy, the nature of the subject matter, how much expertise or prior knowledge the freelancer needs, and how much research, interviewing and so forth are involved. Rates vary somewhat by regions in the US and by countries, too.

This presumes you're not creating original art or photography, but you may need to budget to license either or both.

Production: Web designers get paid well, as we all know. Plan according to what you're paying the ones you already use. There are also attractive templates available through hosted services (and some software). However, the tradeoff for the convenience those templates offer is the almost inevitable adaptations you'll need to make (such as hand-coding HTML for certain formatting), which can be so tedious and time-consuming that it might make more sense to invest in a template custom-designed for you by a graphic designer who has proven experience with newsletters.

If you're sending a straight-text newsletter, you don't need someone to make it look pretty, but you will need to learn tricks to make the text easier to read onscreen.

Distribution: Similarly, if you have only a few hundred subscribers, you can use one of the free services, such as YahooGroups or Topica, if you (and your subscribers) are willing to put up with their advertising in your newsletter. Beyond that stage, hire experienced pros with reliable — very reliable — servers, tech support and other backend resources, or contract with one of the several companies that handle e-mail distribution and list management for a fee (typically based on the number of newsletters you mail each time and as low as $10 per issue), such as Constant Contact, eZine Manager, iMakeNews, Lyris, Sparklist and Vertical Response to high-end services, such as Message Media.

Administration: List management and tech support are major concerns! Again, the more you know about your subscribers and the more flexibility you build in as you get to know them, the better. Some of the hosted services mentioned above allow you to create customized forms for subscribers to check off their interests and so forth, then you can download that data for analysis and follow-up.

All of those services also automatically handle subscriptions, cancellations, bounces and so forth, relieving you of the burden of doing that manually. However you do it, you must have good systems for handling the inevitable bounced mail from nonexistent or changed addresses, to troubleshoot problems, to respond within 24 hours to e-mail from readers and so on.

9. Budget It takes time for a newsletter to build momentum and to tell whether it's effective. Paid-subscription newsletters in print can easily take at least two years to build an audience large enough to break even. Online, a minimum of six months to a year is more the norm, even for free newsletters and even with the aid of "forward to a friend" (a feature not all hosted services include), which is the online equivalent of "pass-along" readership in the print world.

How will you cover your content, promotion and publication costs? Will you solicit or accept ads? Fine idea, unless maintaining editorial integrity and independence and not even the appearance of a conflict of interest is critical to maintaining credibility with your audience. Don't forget that someone's got to format and proofread those, too, which can turn into a real hassle. Also, unless you're backed by a major, mainstream media company or a very well-known and trusted Web site, you won't be able to get advertisers until you have a big enough subscriber base to appeal to them, and you'll need to be able to prove that your market is their market, too.

Figure out how much it will cost you to make it through at least a year and whether you've got the funds to commit to the newsletter. And don't forget to factor in the minimum value of your time.

10. Results What are your expectations? Are you doing the newsletter merely as a credibility tool? As a lead generator? As client service? How will you know it's working — what criteria (specific and measurable) will you use to determine that?

Or is it essential that you can trace revenue directly to it? If so, that income must at least equal your actual costs, so what's your breakeven point and when do you expect to reach it? Add 50% to expenses and the timeframe, minimum, and re-calculate. That's more likely.

It is usually very difficult to tell what new business is the direct result of your newsletter, and it's probably worth doing it for other reasons anyway. What reasons or objectives are sufficient incentives for you, and how are you going to track whether it's achieving those objectives? That could be clickthroughs to your Web site that give you a visitor base to sell to prospective advertisers, e-commerce purchases, phone inquiries, invitations to speak, for instance. The criteria are up to you. The important things are that you know, before you launch a newsletter:

• Determine exactly what kind of payoff you're looking for from your newsletter.
• Identify specific and measurable objectives, so you'll know when or whether you reached them.
• Evaluate your progress, realistically, at least quarterly.

Copyright © 2003, Judith Broadhurst and Polished Prose. All rights reserved.