Welcome to the first edition of Navigator, The Newland Group’s
new online newsletter. We’ve sent this to you because you are a
client, or have spoken with us in the past. We want this to be interesting
and useful and we welcome your feedback. If you prefer not to receive
Navigator four times a year, scroll down to the bottom for details on
how to unsubscribe.
Email
Newsletters - are becoming the most cost-effective
way to communicate with your audience. Find out why, and whether
they could help you, in this edition of Navigator.
Newland
Portfolio – Each edition of Navigator will highlight
a web site that we have recently completed and briefly mention its
special features. In this edition we show you AAA East Pennsylvania.
Useful
Web Resources – Web sites that are worth a look.
We bet you’ll add them to your favourites.
Email newsletters are everywhere; you probably subscribe
to one or more yourself. If you register for a free Hotmail account from
Microsoft, you have to wade through signup buttons for dozens of different
newsletters before you can complete your registration. Clearly these newsletters
are worthwhile for the major corporations, but are there any benefits
in your creating one? The answer is almost certainly a resounding YES!
Email newsletters allow you to communicate cheaply and
effectively with customers and prospects. Surveys have shown that users
have a highly emotional reaction to newsletters and consider them as more
personal than web sites.
Benefits of email newsletters
They get your name in front of your customers and prospects.
Done properly, they improve your image by giving you the opportunity
to educate and inform your target audience.
They can build your prospect and customer databases.
They are far more cost effective and more immediate than printed/mailed
newsletters.
Tips for creating an effective email newsletter
Newsletters must be useful. If they aren’t useful, then they
had better be very entertaining.
Newsletters must be simple and designed so they can be scanned quickly.
They should be delivered regularly so that people come to expect
them. How regularly depends on the content. If you can produce interesting
content every working day, and get people to read it, then you should.
Give it a distinct style and image.
Treat your subscriber list with the utmost respect. Post a privacy
policy on your web site and link to it from every newsletter and every
form where people can subscribe. Do not send out to people with whom
you’ve had no previous relationship. Make it very easy to subscribe
and unsubscribe. Ensure there’s a contact email on every newsletter
so people can request their names be removed.
Beware of all the different email programs people use. If you thought
creating a web site for PCs and Macs, Netscape and Internet Explorer
was tough, wait until you test your newsletter on AOL, Hotmail, Yahoo,
Outlook, Eudora, Pegasus and Lotus Notes.
Test your newsletter against popular SPAM filters. You don’t
want to have it discarded before it even gets delivered.
Choose a subject line for your email that makes people want to open
it.
Encourage feedback by your readers. After all, you’re doing
this for their benefit.
Use technology to measure your effectiveness. How many emails are
getting bounced back? How many are being discarded without being opened?
How many are read more than once? How many web site hits are you getting
as a result of the emails?
What to expect
30-40% of your emails will be opened
4-7% of your respondents will click to your web site
Less than 1% of your recipients will opt out each time you send a
mailing
80-90% of the responses will occur within 48 hours
A
few weeks ago saw the successful launch of the AAA East Pennsylvania
web site at http://www.aaaeastpenn.com.
AAA East Penn is part of the American Automobile Association, which
is affiliated with the CAA, the Canadian Automobile Association.
We faced two particular challenges that are unique to the AAA/CAA
world: The diversity of products and services, ranging from dispatching
a tow truck, selling financial products like Certificates of Deposit,
a full-service travel agency, to selling, renewing and managing
memberships for over 250,000 members. This meant we spent a lot
of time on site structure and page layout so that visitors could
find what they were looking for amongst the 200 or so pages. Secondly,
CAA and AAA provide many of their services in partnerships with
specialist companies, who deliver the services through their own
web servers. As a result we not only had to integrate multiple servers
into one seamless user experience, we had to ensure that only the
appropriate people had access to specific pages on the AAA East
Penn web site and the partner sites, and that the data we passed
between sites was secure and encrypted at all times.
SearchEngineWatch.com is at http://www.searchenginewatch.com/
and it’s the definitive web site for anything to do with search
engines and how to get your site to appear in them. There is a huge free
section that covers how the different search engines work, how to register
your site, different advertising options etc., etc. For US$69 for six
months or $99 for a year, you get access to much more detailed information,
which is updated frequently. And whether or not you join, you can always
sign up for the inevitable email newsletter!
Google News is at http://news.google.ca
or http://news.google.com or http://news.google.co.uk,
or from six other countries, depending on what flavour you like your news.
What differentiates Google News from all those other web news sites, is
that this one is totally automated and continually scans 4,500 news sources
to provide an ever-changing page of headlines, photos and links. Well
worth a look.
A
few weeks ago saw the successful launch of the AAA East Pennsylvania
web site at 
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