Putting your newsletter on the World Wide Web

So you've decided to take a step into the digital age, and publish your newsletter online. Before you take the electronic plunge, there are a few things you have to consider.

Is the Web going to replace or compliment your printed newsletter?

Before you kiss off postage and printing costs forever, ask yourself these questions. How many of my subscribers (or clients) have easy access to the Web? How receptive will they be to the change?

The reality is that a Web newsletter is usually not a replacement for a printed publication. We're still in the Internet's formative years, and that brings with it many roadblocks to a total conversion. Slow download speeds, the difficulty of reading large amounts of print on a computer screen, different browsers, even the fact that not everyone is on the Internet (believe it or not!) - all these mean that you risk losing a good portion of your readership if you drop your printed publication entirely.

What many companies and organizations are finding is that an online newsletter is a great way to compliment a printed publication. The online newsletter is an effective way of gaining readership and subscribers, of bringing late breaking developments that can't be included in the printed piece, and of providing links to outside sources of information and multimedia content relevant to your subject matter. Of course, some industries and sectors can get away with going totally digital - Internet and computer related businesses, for example, can create effective online-only newsletters without alienating their customer base. And if you're starting from scratch, and you're aware of the limitations of the Web, there's no denying that bypassing print and going electronic is a cost-effective way of bringing full colour content to a mass audience.

What kind of material will I include in my electronic newsletter?

Will you publish a webletter that is a carbon copy of your printed piece? Will it be a synopsis of your printed newsletter, a kind of a teaser that will attract readers to the conventional piece? Or will it feature interactive material and hypertext links that build upon the material in your printed newsletter? How you answer this question will impact how you produce your online newsletter.

Production

You've got a few choices here. You can outsource (of course we'd put that as number one - that's how we make our money!), you can code, you can convert, or you can create an e-mail based newsletter.

While we have a vested interest in recommending it, the reality is that outsourcing is not an option for many fledging newsletter publishers, at least not in the beginning. However, if you are an established company or organization, and have a marketing budget, this is really the most cost effective route to go. Why? Because if you figure out the time it takes for a novice to learn to produce a good web site, the software you have to invest in, and the need for your newsletter to look professional, the $40 plus an hour that a graphic designer will charge begins to look like a bargain. It's the same principle that applies to your printed material. Sure, you can spend forty hours doing it yourself and save the cost of a professional, but your time is valuable too. That forty hours times your hourly rate can add up. Why not give it to a designer who can do it in five or six hours?

Lots of us do not, however, have the luxury of a big marketing budget. For us, coding and converting are the other two options for converting a newsletter into a webletter.

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