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The First Newsletter - Electronic News Today 411
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Email Newsletter Design Effort to Cultivate News Sources Launched How do you build community and develop a network of industry contacts with a limited staff? If you offer a free service to a crowd of people that is maxed out, time-wise, then you develop a monthly, opt-out newsletter that provides useful information they would not have time to cultivate on their own, plus you provide ideas for how your site could help them accomplish their goals. Faced with covering a group of people that produce, or perform in, close to 1,000 shows in the New York City area each year, I had two choices: Either I book appointments with two or three artistic directors every day for a year, neglecting all my other duties, or I devise another strategy for reaching them. I tried traditional mailers to limited success. By one marketing theory, it takes six to eight points of contact to cultivate a relationship. That's a lot of flyers and postcards or an even greater number of phone calls. So, the only other option I could think of was to create a news network tied to an email newsletter. I would update artistic directors of New York City area theatre companies on the new stories and future plans of the site as well as mention ways that they could put our site to work for them. While creating an opt-in email newsletter would be the preferred method of establishing this network, a small online venture is not afforded the same opportunity to wait on results that a corporate venture would be. An opt-out strategy was adopted. To de-emphasized the monthly message's email-newsletter-nature, I did not create a logo for it, choosing, instead, to address the recipients in a friendlier manner. To make the various free services that ActorsUpdate offers more visible, I gave them their own mini-headline status. This is important because I think most people scan the first few sentences to make sure the email is not a get-rich-quick or sex-site spam, then scan the rest of the document to gauge its worth. By anchoring what we can do for our news network members throughout the document, we stand a better chance of having one service catch their eye and prompt them to read the rest of the document.
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