[epub] RE: How to get subscribers?

["Kupferman, Mark" <Mark.Kupferman@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Title: RE: [epub] How to get subscribers?

Rocky,

Our experience has been that if people can get everything in your newsletter from the web page then they see no reason to sign up for your newsletter, which entails a certain amount of risk on their part (i.e., you'll take their e-mail information and anonymously sell it to a spammer regardless of what you have in your privacy policy).

What we've tried to do is put value added stuff *in* our newsletter -- stuff that readers can only take advantage of as newsletter subscribers.

Examples:

-- Contest in every issue of our newsletter. Non subscribers can read about the contest when they read the online version of our newsletter -- but they can't actually join the contest unless they subscribe.

-- Coupons in every issue of our newsletter. Actually, the coupons aren't IN the newsletter -- a link takes them to a web page that generates a personalized coupon with their name and personal information right in the middle (to discourage people from making copies of the coupons). The coupons will only generate for people who are actual newsletter subscribers.

-- Special offers for subscribers. Doesn't happen all the time, but only people who sign up for our newsletter are eligible to receive occasional sales alerts.

We also use an ongoing contest on our web site to get folks to sign up -- "Sign up to try our new newsletter and you could win tickets to the park instantly!" We have at least an average of one winner a day. Showing the names of past winners helps too.  Of course, this depends on your prize and business. We're theme parks, so a pair of park tickets goes a long way and doesn't cost us much (especially since we can deliver the prizes via electronic tickets)

Curiously, since we only allow people to sign-up for our newsletter once a day, we get a large number of people who return to our web site on a daily basis to sign up again and again. Doesn't grow our subscriber list, but it does drive web traffic and frankly doesn't cost us anything.

Also important: We make it VERY clear how easy it is to unsubscribe at any time with just one click, and we promise never to "share, sell, rent or give away your personal information to ANYONE."

Our newsletter signup is at: <http://www.parkfeedback.com/news/signup.aspx>
Sample (current) newsletters are at: <http://www.parkfeedback.com/news/>

Good luck!

Mark Kupferman
Director of Research
Paramount Parks, Inc. - A Viacom Company

-----Original Message-----
From: Rocky Ramsey [mailto:rockram@xxxxxxxx]
Sent: Friday, May 07, 2004 2:18 PM
To: Epub Discussion Group
Subject: [epub] How to get subscribers?

I've been working to get people to my website through link exchanges and other traffic generating sources and it's working pretty well.  I've already had almost 2000 hits this month.  That's the good news.

The problem I'm having is that they aren't subscribing to my ezine.
Through my website stats, it appears that they like what they're reading on the website because they're loading several webpages.

Any suggestions on how to get more people to subscribe to my ezine?

I'm looking for something to give away as a promotional item, but haven't found anything that I'm happy with yet. 

My website address is : http://MoviesMoneyandMore.com.  My ezine is posted on the website.

Any help you could offer would be greatly appreciated.

Thank you,

Rocky

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