Are newsletters still an effective way to keep in touch with your audience?
April 14, 2008
I’ve been running the killersites.com newsletter (among a few others) for several years now. Though I’ve found it to effective, with regards to keeping in touch with people, it is clearly not what it used to be.
Stupid Spammers
Yea, the porn and pill spammers have really done a lot of harm to newsletters. These days, if you send out a newsletter, you will have to deal with a few things that just get in the way:
1. Email filters – gone wild.
2. Angry (crazy) recipients.
These days, email filters are really fined tuned to catch just about any type of spam. Unfortunately, they tend to trash real email from time to time. So when writing my newsletter, I have to be careful to avoid certain keywords that might get my newsletter blocked.
Angry People
Because spammers have bombarded people with spam email so much, some people’s nerves are just red hot – any possibility that an email is spam and they loose it.
… Even some (after signing up to my newsletter) go nuts on me, sending me nasty emails threatening to call my hosting company etc … for ‘spamming’ them. These days it seems, if you send an email to someone who even signed up to your newsletter, can be interpreted as spam! I even have an unsubscribe link at the bottom of each email … and I still get barked at.
RSS – the easy alternative to newsletters
It clear to me that using RSS (real simple syndication) is the way to go because the user has to subscribe and pull the information down from you. With newsletters, you have to send the reader the newsletter … you push vs. RSS, where the reader pulls the information.
The downside of RSS feeds is that the user has to have an RSS reader. That means your audience has to be a touch more sophisticated.
How to set up an RSS feed for your website?
The easiest way is to set up a blog (like Worpress) since all blogging software include built in RSS feeds. You could set up an RSS manually, given that RSS is really just a text document formatted with XML, according to the RSS specification. But why bother to go through the hassle since blogs will do it automatically.
If you want to learn more about setting up and running WordPress, I have a bunch of free WordPress videos for you.
Thanks,
Stefan Mischook
www.killersites.com
www.killerphp.com
