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Blog posts tagged newsletter
Editor’s round-up: Time for some changes. Nothing major, mind.
May 14, 2010
When you run the website that never sleeps (officially, following our election shenanigans last week), you become very aware of things that aren’t working as well as they should and other things you’re not doing that you should be. We have long lists of both that never seem to get shorter, no matter how much work we do.
This week, though, we can claim two or three small victories in our battle to stem the tide of stuff that should be better.
First up, James has built a small business events calendar where you can submit your events and find out what else is going on. An events calendar is something every small business website should have, and now we’ve got one. Barring illness, accident and volcanic eruption, it’ll go live next Wednesday.
You’ll have to be a registered user to access the calendar - as with all of our tools. We put some of our goodies behind registration for a couple of reasons: for you, it reinforces the sense that by signing up to the Marketing Donut, you’re joining a community; by registering, you can leave comments, access tools and receive our monthly newsletter, MyDonut.
For us, your registration means we have people to send our newsletter to, we can keep you informed of what we’re up to and we can conduct surveys that enable us to tailor our offering to your needs. It’s basic marketing and it works for everyone, we hope.
Our registration and sign-in processes haven’t been great, however. So we’ve improved them. This is the new registration page, with its simpler form, and you can now also sign in from any page using the ‘Sign-in’ button at the top of the screen. Basically, it’s a lot less hassle to access all our special stuff.
But we haven’t stopped there: we’ve also tweaked the MyDonut newsletter, as those of you who received the latest issue yesterday will have noticed. We’ve made a few small design changes so it’s easier to scan content; the big change, though, has been shifting the main articles away from the Donut websites and onto dedicated newsletter pages.
It’s one of those things we ummed and ahhed about. Surely we want to drive as much traffic as we can to the Donut websites? Well, yes, but we have a greater obligation to think of your experience as readers. Having dedicated pages makes it much easier for you to navigate the newsletter content. We’ve still got plenty of links to the Donut sites, but the whole thing feels more coherent now.
The new format also means we can offer you exclusive content and offers. This means I can now answer the question “Why should I sign up to your newsletter?” with much more confidence. You should sign up because it’s a) really good; and b) has information you can’t get anywhere else. Sounds good to me. By the way, this month’s issue is the best yet, in my opinion (though you won’t know that unless you’re signed up).
So, I guess this is a blog about two things - making things better and building a sense of community, and I find that the two are inseparably linked. Whenever I meet you, I’m always taken aback by your enthusiasm for what we do, but at the back of my mind there’s always that feeling that we could be doing it better.
Speaking of meeting you…
Meet the Donuts!
If you happen to be going to the Business Startup exhibition at the ExCel Centre in London next Thursday and Friday (20 and 21 May), then please come to our stand and say hello. Who knows, you may even get a doughnut.
Tickets to the event are free and you can order them online or by calling 0117 930 4927. See you there?
What Can We Learn From The Spammers?
August 19, 2009
We have all had it haven’t we? We open our personal email inbox only to find our account has been targeted by some unscrupulous spammer to promote all manner of products and services from 'cheap viagra' to ‘red hot webcam action’. They are a constant annoyance but is there anything that small businesses can learn from the tactics they employ for their online campaigns?
One thing spammers do well is they provide an absolutely relentless feed of communication to their target email lists. These lists can often contain literally thousands of addresses and are accumulated by means of clever programs known as ‘spambots’ which automatically search for email addresses online. Simliar ‘botnet’ programs are used to distribute the emails to a massive list. In fact it was reported last year that most spam in the world comes from only six botnets!
While email providers such as Google Mail, Yahoo Mail and Hotmail do their best to filter out such messages, it is a constant war with the botnets who will work to find another way round the system. From a business perspective such a botnet program is low cost to run but reaches literally thousands of email addresses with messages in a relatively short space of time. Little or no regard is paid to fact that most of the recipients find the message completely irrelevant, obscene and annoying.
Something else spammers are also good at is creating compelling subject lines that lead you to open the email. However, they can be very deceptive and are often made to look like emails from legitimate businesses, the bank or personal contacts. Recently, I received an email from a ‘Milan Hofmeister’ with the subject line ‘Your Bank Details Have Been Compromised’. On opening the email I found that it was in fact promoting some sort of online shop where I could get two free bottles of wine.
This sort of deceptive mass email strategy is not advisable for businesses who would want to develop a good reputation online. A better approach would be an email campaign in the form of a targeted informative newsletter with a compelling yet relevant subject header. There should be an option for people to unsubscribe from the list at any point with immediate effect. It is also important to note that campaigns should stay within due diligence to prevent being blacklisted as spam.
There are many hurdles that businesses face in creating a consistent online strategy but it is important to be aware of the many different and often volatile factors. While it may sound obvious the strategy needs to effectively target the right people who would be potentially interested in your product to get the best results.
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