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Electronic
Newsletters - Part II: Electronic newsletters are the wave of the future for disseminating timely information. This article will address the pros and cons of using e-mail to deliver your electronic newsletter, and then show how integrating your Club web site into the process will yield even a better experience. HTML vs. Plain Text E-mail. Modern e-mail applications such as Microsoft's Outlook and Netscape Mail offer users the option of receiving their e-mail in HTML format. In other words, e-mail no longer has to be simply text. Colors, pictures, and even animations can be part of your e-mail. Caution must be taken, though, when sending HTML-style email to a large number of people. Many people still use plain text e-mail programs such as Eudora, or they may set their e-mail programs to only show plain text. HTML-style e-mail sent to people who can only view plain text e-mail will not be very successful. In most cases, the formatting of the e-mail will be so badly destroyed that it is illegible to the reader. The solution to this issue lies in understanding the audience you send to. Give people an option to select HTML-style or plain text style newsletters in their e-mail. Then, when it comes time to send out the newsletter, send out one fancy newsletter that contains HTML-style formatting, and one plain text newsletter that only contains text. This, however, can be a bit cumbersome, and create a duplication of effort. The better solution is to combine your e-mail newsletter with your Club web site. E-mail and your Web Site, Working Together. If you have a Club web site already, (and you should if you expect to be successful in the upcoming years), you have seen how powerful the technology can be for delivering information. In a matter of hours, if not minutes, after an event has happened, the information can be put on your Club web site. The only drawback is that your audience needs to actively decide to look at the site before they will know that the information has changed. Even further, one of your viewers may go to the web site, but never browse to the area that has the new and exciting information. So how do you as a Club get your viewers to not only go to the site when there is new information, but get them to the correct area? The answer is e-mail. Just as the population as a whole is used to checking their postal mail regularly, in the same fashion people are checking their e-mail regularly. Use e-mail as a mechanism to announce that information is available on your club web site, and then have links from the e-mail to the appropriate areas on your web site. Your readers will appreciate well-chosen e-mail updates about events at the club, and you can begin to leverage their loyalty in promoting club events. |
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