Building a Web Site For Dummies®, 3rd Edition

Opt-In Newsletters

Newsletters are short, privately produced publications that focus on a single topic. They’ve been around for hundreds of years, but rising postage costs drove many of them out of business. Now that e-mail is such a common part of life, newsletters are making a major comeback. In its purest form, a newsletter is dedicated to covering current situations, like a newspaper does, but it usually provides a deeper analytical approach. Other newsletters, on the other hand, have nothing to do with news and instead deal with business or professional interests. Because they’re often written by one person or a small team of people, they tend to be informal and highly opinionated.

I once received a remarkably honest item that looked a great deal like a newsletter. Under the title, the masthead bore the motto “A Catalog Thinly Disguised as a Newsletter.” That’s probably the single most common use of newsletters. Even if they’re not directly offering products for sale, they’re still sales and marketing tools. Many consultants, for example, send out monthly newsletters packed with advice and insights. Yes, they’re giving away a service for free this way, but they’re also publicizing their expertise.

Many services let you send messages to their own targeted lists of e-mail addresses. Normally, this practice is considered spamming, but if the lists are generated from opt-ins, that’s another matter entirely. Opt-in mailing lists are much less intrusive or prone to errors than normal ...