E-zineanomics (Part II)

The key to a good e-zine is to get the reader’s attention. E-zines are good ways to combine your marketing messages with new announcements, and industry news.

Note: For every e-zine issue, make sure it is interesting and relevant. If not the recipient will not open up the email.

Your e-zine should consist of customized messages – that is of interest to your audience. If your e-zine leads with regional information, you may want to consider having different issues that are geographic specific.

Note: E-zines are not stand-alone. You want the viewer to email you or click to your web site to obtain more information. For example you may have a summary of an article in your e-zine and a read more link to a specific page to your web site. (The link should be to the relevant page. Do not have the viewer go to your home page and have to navigate to the additional information they are seeking.)

Some content creation suggestions:

• Make sure your subject line of your email is attention grabbing. Also make it consistent so that they will recognize it and know to open the email. Using the name of your e-zine is a good strategy.
• Select a good name. The above suggestion works well when you select an e-zine name that is also eye-catching.
• Keep in mind the following two tenets when writing content: Relevance – your e-zine is specifically targeted to your audience and Brevity – keep content focused and succinct. No long text.
• Keep articles no long then 300 – 500 words. Use links to your web site articles page to provide full articles.
• For a given e-zine think of a theme. This theme will help you select article topics and other content elements.
• Establish a structure or skeleton for your e-zine. Try and follow that layout skeleton for each issue. Try to keep the number of articles to no more then 5. You do not want to have a long table of contents.
• Your e-zine need not be created in HTML (this is the format that most email/e-zine providers offer.) You can create your e-zine as plain text.
• E-zines should contain multiple calls-to-action
• Must contain more information then promotional material. If not it is not an e-zine but an advertisement
• A good format for an e-zine is one that has multiple columns

And finally you still may be wondering what do I write about? Here is just a list of some of the many topics you can cover in your e-zine:

• Advice and options
• Membership communications
• Stories
• Product support articles
• Event calendar highlights
• Book reviews
• Summaries of larger bodies of information

For our blog readers, please share with us topics that you have found very useful.