How We Do It – Publishing an E-newsletter at Second Nature

E-mail is one of the most popular and powerful marketing tools available to businesses on the Web today. A Web site alone, without effective use of e-mail, can leave a company’s marketing efforts lacking punch.

So how can one take advantage of e-mail marketing? At Second Nature in Nashville, Tenn., we have found that one of the best ways is to implement an opt-in e-newsletter from our Web site: www.secondnature.net.

We decided to implement an e-newsletter for two primary reasons. First, to provide useful information on lawn care to an information hungry audience. The typical Internet user seeks information on which to base his or her purchase decisions. If we can offer good content without a hard sell to visitors, then we can gain trust and loyalty in the eyes of potential customers. Second, if we can remind these potential customers of our services by providing them additional information from time-to-time we might be able to convert these users to customers.

There are a few simple rules we learned when implementing our e-newsletter:

1. Provide valuable information. When writing the e-mail content of our issues, we keep a clear picture of the end users in mind. Do they understand the jargon of our industry? Do they care about the latest green industry news or are they really concerned with the half-acre of grass under their children’s feet?

2. Have a content strategy. Original content – news, tips, etc. – takes work. We collect published information that can be freely distributed and take a few moments weekly to write down situations and solutions we have encountered while working with current customers (i.e. a common outbreak of fungus during an extended hot and wet time-frame).

3. Make it short and simple. We try and respect our e-newsletter subscribers’ time by keeping our e-newsletter relatively free of long advertisements and hard sells.

4. Promote your e-newsletter prominently. We promote our e-newsletter on our Web site and on any other written material (regular e-mail, brochures, etc.). We built a small, unobtrusive pop-up window that launches when a visitor hits our Web site’s index page. This way, visitors can sign up there rather than search for the sub-page where the sign-up resides. On the registration page, we also include links to sample issues and our privacy policy so people can get more information before they sign up.

Finally, here’s a review of the tools we use

1. Opt-in e-mail. Too collect our users’s e-mail addresses we use opt-in e-mail, which is permission-based so recipients have confirmed their interest. Recipients are also able to unsubscribe from the list at any time, and all e-mail messages are clearly identified as coming from a specific and approved source.

2. A delivery system. We employ a Web master (www.spinshop.com) and a CGI script to publish and distribute our e-newsletter. This combination meets our needs and is relatively inexpensive – we pay our Web master $255 monthly to maintain the site and send our e-newsletters in a timely fashion. We have complete control over the amount of information a subscriber must include and can keep the user on our Web site during the sign-up process. More limited agreements can cost less.

3. A publishing strategy. Since our Web master knows HTML and CGI scripts but not much about turf care, we devised a way to deliver the content to him monthly so he can input it into the delivery system and send it. We try to make sure our subscribers receive no more than one e-mail a month from us – this is a good balance for our customers and our already-taxed employees.

We started providing our e-newsletter two years ago and used the opt-in process to capture subscribers. After one year, we had 41 subscribers and by early 2002 we had 60 to 75 subscribers. We also gave our e-newsletter a catchy title – Tips From the Tool Shed – to entice Web site visitors and customers to check it out.– Steve White

The author is president of Second Nature, Nashville, Tenn.