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Future-Proof Your Marketing With Online Newsfeeds

64% of business e-mail is never opened. And there’s no way to know how many copies of your e-zine gather dust in busy mailboxes or how many are destroyed by spam filters before they get that chance.

Marketing messages never reaching their audience should worry any marketer, but life is more worrying if the audience is also getting harder to grow.

Today, everyone is uneasy about privacy loss, spyware, spam, identity theft, and unnamed menaces that might have been invented but we just haven’t heard about yet. That can only make people even more reluctant to disclose their name and e-mail address to get your e-zine than they might have been in the past.

Taken together, those trends make marketing by e-zine alone more difficult and less effective.

What can you do about it?

If you look at your e-zine as a product, you can think about diversifying your product range in response to a changing market. Keep publishing your e-zine as standard, but publish a parallel version of it as an online newsfeed.

It doesn’t take a great leap of technology, or of know-how, to get a newsfeed off the ground; you can do the job quickly and relatively easily. But, like their offline friends, online businesses can be slow to grasp new opportunities, and for some, it might require a small leap of faith.

Those who have embraced newsfeeds already have an advantage over those who have not because newsfeeds overcome the inherent risks of ‘e-zine only’ marketing. Because newsfeeds don’t involve e-mail at all, they can’t get stuck in spam filters, and they can’t get lost in mailboxes.

They simply make your news available in a form anyone around the world can subscribe to - without telling you about it and without giving you their address. That deprives you of a mailing list opportunity that an e-zine subscription would have provided, but that’s the point – your e-zine subscriptions are dropping off anyway!

New subscribers get to keep their privacy, and you get them to read your news, whenever you want, for zero cost. Your newsfeed keeps them interested in your website, because your news items link to it, and it also provides a richer reading experience than your e-zine currently does. Everyone wins.

Subscribers read newsfeeds using a type of web browser--called a newsreader--which frees you to publish material you would otherwise have to send as e-mail attachments and so make your e-zine more susceptible to filtering by anti-virus systems.

There is nothing an e-zine can do that a newsfeed can’t do better. And there are some things a newsfeed can do that an e-zine can’t do at all. You can include pictures, video, and audio in newsfeeds, making your news as sharp and attractive as your website.

They’re a great way to showcase products and special offers, and there are no mailing lists to worry about.

Subscriber expectations of an e-zine mean you have to wait until you have enough news to make a reasonably sized edition. Not so with a newsfeed; you can publish news when you have it. Any amount of news, however small, will be automatically collected for subscribers by their newsreader software without you having to mail out anything to anyone. Think of it as ‘always on’ publishing.

So how do you get people to subscribe?

At the very least, you can promote your newsfeed in your e-zine and on your website. But there are more than a hundred search engines and directories specializing in newsfeeds, most of which are free to use. By telling them your newsfeed exists, you automatically give it momentum and expose your website to potentially wider audiences.

Newsfeeds help to insure against subscriber drop-off by giving people a more convenient way of getting your news, and they give you a chance to reach wider, or less crowded, markets.