Well, your E-Zine is all put together. Your site is up. Everything is ready to go. There is just one problem. You don't have a clue how often you should send out your email or update your site, depending on whether your doing an email E-Zine or a web based one. The truth is, frequency is a bigger problem than most people realize for several reasons. We are going to take a look at some of the technical and not so technical problems when it comes to deciding how frequently you want to send out your E-Zine to your subscriber base. Let's go over the technical problem first as that will probably be the most obvious to most marketers doing this for the first time. For starters, content doesn't just fall out of the sky. If you are going to send out an E-Zine email or update a web site, it is not going to happen all by itself. For one thing, unless you have got a brain like a steal trap, the ideas themselves are not going to just come. In some cases you may have to actually do some research on a particular topic that you want to write about. Then there is the actual typing itself. And if you want to include photos or clip art, well that is more time involved. Depending on how involved this gets, you could be spending a considerable amount of time doing this. Well, the last thing you want to do is tell your subscribers that you're going to be providing them a daily E-Zine when it will be a near miracle to get one out once a week. So before you even decide on a frequency to publish your E-Zine, try to figure out approximately how long an issue is going to take to get out. Now, of course if you decide not to publish the frequency of the E-Zine and just send it out when you can, the above problem is not so much a problem. Or is it? People are strange animals. They are all different and quite unpredictable. Some people may subscribe to your E-Zine and expect their first issue right away. Furthermore, they may expect an issue daily as they are thirsty for knowledge. For these people, having to wait a week to get the latest issue could be like spending an eternity watching Brady Bunch reruns. And then there are those who subscribe to your E-Zine and forget that they did five minutes later. So when they actually do get it, they may be quite surprised. They may also figure that now they won't be hammered with emails until the next week at most. Two ends of the spectrum. And trust me, finding a happy median between the two is not easy. Publish your E-Zine too often and you might turn off your subscribers and make them think that you are just trying to sell them something. Ultimately, what happens is they unsubscribe rather quickly. On the other hand, if you don't publish often enough, you may just lose them because of loss of interest. On way to partially battle this problem is to send out an E-Zine with a poll, asking your current subscribers how often they would like to receive information. If you get a response that favors a particular frequency then by all means use it. The best thing to do is to try to put yourself in your subscribers shoes. Ask yourself how often YOU would like to be emailed? Remember, most of these people are getting emails from a lot of different places. Probably sending your E-Zine everyday is going to be too much. Once or twice a week is probably a good bet. You don't want your subscribers to either forget you or get sick of you. It is a fine line to walk. But with practice, you will get real good at it. |
