Knight's Ezine Industry Recap For 2004



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Knight's Ezine Industry Recap For 2004
By Christopher Knight

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2004 was a great year where we learned that EZINES and EMAIL are not dead nor are they [as a strategy] going to take a back seat to RSS (Really Simple Syndication). Read on for my quick recap of the year 2004 in review for ezine publishers:

Ezine Churn, Churn, Churn…

If 2003 saw email churn rates of 30%, 2004 saw churn rates as high as 45% on average from my experience and research. Email churn formerly was caused by email list members who unsubscribed and wanted to get off your list. Now days, email addresses are going bad so fast that they make up the majority of your email churn.

Why are they going bad? People are abandoning their email accounts due to spam and they leave their information overload life by shutting down the email account all together without much care for re-subscribing.

Email Deliverability Takes The Stage:

2004 was also the year that email deliverability could not be ignored by most email publishers. Ignorance may be bliss, but if 90% of your emails are not getting opened – you’re wasting your time. Publishers and marketers began giving stronger consideration in 2004 to open rates and if you haven’t yet – consider tracking this immediately for your HTML & MIME-based email newsletters.

Pass The CAN of SPAM Please…

The US Federal CAN-SPAM act got updated to further define transactional email definitions and the first lawsuits emerged. It’s not that the CAN-SPAM act actually reduced the spam load, but that they are tightening the “fear-noose” on marketers that might think again before considering spam as a legitimate practice.

Legitimate emails dropped in comparison to Spam:

Check out a December press release from Postini that tells the tale:

“This past year saw the amount of legitimate email drop from 22% to just 12%, while viruses rose over the past year from roughly half a percent to one and a half percent according to Postini's Email Stat Track. The virus infection average ratio during 2004 was 1 in 67, compared to 2003, when 1 in 200 messages were infected with a virus. Towards the end of the year viruses were infecting 1 in 25 emails.”
Source: http://biz.yahoo.com/prnews/041215/sfw088_1.html

Email Newsletter Formats Changed:

ASCII or plain text as an email newsletter format is not dead, but it’s losing ground to clean-looking HTML formats that also allow better tracking and reporting.

Another ezine format trend that took place in 2004 is that many email newsletter publishers discontinued sending the full article in the body of the newsletter and instead – sent teaser summaries or abstracts and a link to the full article on the web.

Three reasons why this is happening:

The belief held or the results tested by some publishers that indicates that the reader will surf more pages or are more likely to buy product if you can get them out of email and into the website…
The influence of Google Adsense that rewards publishers for driving traffic that can create qualified clicks for their program.
The ability for publishers to get their emails past the filters as there are less words in the summary when compared to the full article that might trip the filters. Re-read the previous sentence one more time carefully and consider the impact.

Email-based subscription methods: R.I.P.

Buried in the cemetery of awesome tools that are now laid to rest thanks to spammers and virus writers: 2004 marked the end to the viability for email-based subscription methods for email newsletters. I’m talking about ending the ability to allow your members to subscribe to your ezine via email… and instead, they’ll have to use a web-based form only from now on. Why? Because of joe-jobs or spoof spam.

Content Changes for 2004 & Email Scanning

Broad-based chatty or generic information is no longer appropriate for ezines. Ezines that offered fluff for content were left in the dark last year… and it’s not that there are not the occasional low-quality content ezines out there, but that greater success is being had with narrow topics and more in depth, yet brief bullets of data.

According to Jakob Nielson’s 2004 study, 57% of email readers only “scan” or “skimmed” their emails with 22% being never read and 10% being saved to read later (or be never read again). A few email publishers missed the memo on this fact and still send 3-5 full length articles via email, but the trend is in the other direction.

Ezine Publisher's Began Their Embrace of RSS

A solid percentage of smart ezine publishers began publishing their ezines in the RSS format in 2004 (in addition to keeping their ezine in operation). This was to prevent or save declining readership due to the higher attrition rates of email subscribers who are abandoning their accounts.

"Audio" shows its head (and ears) in Ezines:

You can say you saw it hear first or in a handful of other newsletters where early adopter publishers began using shockwave flash audio to deliver their ezines in an audio format in addition to the text. Expect to see more savvy publishers/marketers add this to their ezines in 2005.

2004 Conclusion:

Email is not dead. Ezines are not dead. RSS is now part of the family or should be part of yours soon. Shorter ezines that are narrowly focused are in and fat bloated ezines are on a diet. Spam has had its impact on increasing your list churn and the CAN-SPAM act as an intimidator has began its force...yet it has not (in my opinion) curbed the flow of spam worldwide. 2005 is going to be a great year for email newsletter publishers who go the extra mile!

Click Here To Read Christopher Knight's Predictions For Ezine Publishers in 2005.

This Ezine-Tip was submitted By Christopher Knight -- Email List Marketing Expert, author and entrepreneur. Get your weekly dose of Email newsletter publishing, marketing, promotion, management, email-etiquette, email usability and deliverability tips by joining the free Ezine-Tips newsletter: http://www.emailuniverse.com/subscribe/.

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Knight's Ezine Industry Recap For 2004By Christopher Knight

Knight's Ezine Industry Recap For 2004
By Christopher Knight