Promoting Through Newsletters

Promoting Through Newsletters

 
Whatever you are selling, there’s an e-mail newsletter read by your customers. Some newsletters have tens, even hundreds of thousands of subscribers. Promoting through e-mail newsletters can be incredibly effective; it’s a very cheap way to reach large numbers of people very quickly. First, you need to find e-mail newsletters read by your prospects. Here are a few places to find them:

■ New List (http://new-list.com)

■ E-Zine List (http://www.e-zine-list.com)

■ Newsletter Access (http://www.newsletteraccess.com/)

■ NewJour (http://gort.ucsd.edu/newjour/)

■ Remember the search engines!

 
We recommend that you create a directory of useful newsletters; you’ll want to reach these people a number of times. You should then contact these people, with a number of suggestions:

■ Let them know you exist, using a simple, informal PR piece. Remember that anyone who is publishing a newsletter needs content! They need information. If you hit them at the right time with the right story, you may get picked up.

■ Later, announce a special offer or discount.

■ Suggest a giveaway, a contest of some kind. You might promote a single drawing for a product to a single newsletter if it’s very large, or perhaps promote the drawing to several newsletters at once.

■ Announce new products.

■ Approach the newsletter and suggest a revenue-sharing proposition of some kind, in which the newsletter earns commissions on sales. If you have an affiliate program, the newsletter editor can sign up through that; if you are using Yahoo! Merchant Solutions, you can create a trackable link A word of warning about promoting to newsletters. You’d better do it right. If you don’t have a story that is of interest to the newsletter’s readers, you are not a useful information source to
the editor; you are merely a nuisance.