Editor’s
Corner:
DIVERSIFYING DELIVERY CHANNELS
This is a hot topic these days. Vendors urge you to go from print to
e-mail. Put your print pages up on the Web simultaneously. Give the
print reader access to everything you have in a database online. Send
daily updates via e-mail and eliminate the cost of faxing.
Before you take the leap, ask yourself, are we prepared to handle
more than one delivery channel? Does our subscriber or customer database
create distribution lists that we can easily integrate into an e-mail
package or fax software?
Then think about your image and the purpose of a newsletter, for
example. Do you have a lot invested in your logo? Do many readers
circulate your print edition? With an e-mail edition, especially an
ASCII (text only file) the pass-along value is lost, the attractive logo
never lies on readers’ desks beckoning them to read the whole
newsletter. With an e-mail edition readers can quickly flip through the
text, save it to a file on their hard drives thinking they’ll get back
to it only to forget about it entirely, perhaps. Or, worst case
scenario, the reader blasts copies of the newsletter to several
colleagues via e-mail violating your copyright. Not that a copying
machine can’t do the same in the hard copy world.
I’ve written about promotional e-mail newsletters that reinforce a
print publication and attract new readers. That I am sure is worth
doing. But I’m not sure about the profitability of e-mail newsletters.
Marketing them is still expensive, since qualified e-mail lists have yet
to be developed. You could spam a whole lot of people with mixed
results. Mailing lists that you can rent don’t necessarily tell you
who has an e-mail address that he or she actually uses. It might be hard
to find your target without dropping more mail than you’d want to.
The solution then is to offer print, e-mail and fax editions and
cater to every channel. Which brings me back to the beginning of this
discussion. How many channels can you juggle?
We’re looking at starting an e-mail edition to MWT to answer some
of these questions ourselves. If you’re interested in receiving the
newsletter by e-mail, send your request to sarah@mwt.com.
