THE ISSUES
SPAM Regulations and Opt-out
You must always provide the recipient with the opportunity to unsubscribe - on every newsletter - and have the systems and resources to manage your database.
The US, Australia and other countries have already introduced anti-SPAM legislation that makes it illegal to send email newsletters without clearly identifying the sender and providing a method to unsubscribe. New Zealand is likely to introduce legislation soon but anyone who is trying to avoid the accusation of sending SPAM will follow the basic rules.
For a business guide to the Australian Spam Act 2003 - in PDF format - see
http://www.acma.gov.au/acmainterwr/consumer_info/frequently_asked_questions/spam_business_practical_guide.pdf
The three key steps you should follow are:
- Consent Only send commercial electronic messages with the addressee’s
consent - either express or inferred consent.
- Identify Include clear and accurate information about the person or
business that is responsible for sending the commercial
electronic message.
- Unsubscribe Ensure that a functional unsubscribe facility is included in all
your commercial electronic messages. Deal with unsubscribe
requests promptly.
 Address Lists and Opt-in Subscriptions
The best way to generate repeat visitors and capture their email address is by offering an opt-in subscription to some kind of publication. Give an incentive and a reason for someone to join your newsletter. People are not willing to just hand you over their email address with no idea what they will be getting for it. The newsletter should always carry relevant, useful content, not just advertising. As long as it is useful, people will love it and pass it on to several friends.
Keep in touch with your customers and website visitors by starting your own Free Internet newsletter or magazine - ezine. Offer free information with no strings attached, and no pressure to buy. Receiving the newsletter must be subscription based, so this advertising solution is SPAM-FREE and easily personlised or targeted to a specific subset of your database.
eZines give you the opportunity to use a more personal tone than on a website, fostering a sense of community that can strengthen your brand recognition. eZines should be set up to begin with a personalised greeting. Encourage feedback. Ask your readers to tell you how they use your products. Host a Question and Answer column. Using this technique, you can develop a sense of community for your readers and as a bonus, you get material for your eZine.
Newsletters with an identifiable personality have more appeal. Full colour, graphical
ezines are attention grabbers but not everyone has the software
to view them correctly.
Using email, differences in location and time zone are less of an obstacle to communication. Email is cheaper and faster than a letter, less intrusive than a phone call, less hassle than a FAX. Response times for direct mail can be 3-6 weeks but 3 days for email. Ideal for last minute promtions such as seats still available for an event or end of line sales.
Ezine Frequency
Before you can go on to decide content and frequency of publication of your ezine, you need to look at the resources at your disposal for producing your newsletter. If you start an email campaign, make sure you have the resources within your company to respond quickly - people expect immediate response to email.
Maintaining your email newsletter database and sending out bulk email can be difficult and time consuming without the appropriate software.
Axys can provide the software to manage opt-in subscription lists and mail out the text and html versions of your ezine. We also organise welcome, confirmation and unsubscribe emails.
Ezine Quality
Sending high quality email newsletters is not a simple procedure and it is important to protect your companies image by producing high quality emails. Tthe relationship with your customers can easily be damaged by inappropriate or sub-standard email correspondence.
Email reading software is even less consistent in the way it handles HTML email layout than web browsers so it is worth getting professional advice for anything more than the most simple email design.
- Microsoft have made it seem easy for Outlook and Word users to produce well formatted HTML emails. However these Microsoft formatted emails will not display well in non-Microsoft email readers and they include large amounts of redundant HTML code.
- Sending emails to Apple Mac users adds another level of complexity.
- Creating a format where the layout will not be corrupted when the email is forwarded to another recipient is a challenge.
- Sending emails to web-browser based mail readers like Hotmail has its own special considerations.
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