Up to relatively recently, publishing a newsletter from your site was regarded the ultimate Website promotion tool. The adage "you must have a newsletter" was quickly spread by so many self-proclaimed Internet marketing "gurus". Sure, as a simple and low cost means of keeping in touch with paying customers and site visitors alike, it does appear a "must do" for anyone running a Website. A successful newsletter is certainly still a great marketing asset. But achieving that goal is a lot harder than it was, say 5 or even 10 years ago.

The main obstacle is building a reasonably large and faithful readership. With perhaps over 50% of sites offering free subscriptions to a newsletter, an ezine or a mailing list of sorts, that's a lot of people screaming "Subscribe here!" And that simply doesn't improve anyone's chances of signing readers up.

So how do you go about building a sizeable subscriber base? Many tricks and tips have been developed over the years, most of these focusing on giving potential subscribers an incentive in the form of a freebie. The downside of this approach is clear for all to see: if the subscriber is really only after the freebie, they will probably unsubscribe at the first possible occasion, or never read your newsletter, or "block" you as a sender, thereby relegating your mailing automatically to the trashcan.

We feel that the most reliable way to build a good readership is simple: a good quality, themed Website with top notch content that presents the owners as an authority on their subject is likely to get prospects interested in receiving further information from you. Period. No tips or tricks required. Only subscribers that sign up for the actual content will be faithful and can potentially be converted into buying customers.

And that brings us to the second obstacle: content. Without fresh, unique and interesting content, your readers will log off quickly and your readership will dwindle faster that it will grow. Putting together great content is time consuming. Don't stretch yourself: a monthly newsletter with valuable content is worth far more than a flimsy weekly that's full of ads, rather than anything of actual interest.

One way of providing content is by accepting articles from guestwriters. Again, quality and relevance are the keywords and compromising on either can cost you dearly in readership.

Your newsletter can be published in plain text, HTML, RTF or as a Webpage. In terms of creating a professional look and feel, the latter formats have the advantage over plain text. But these formats are also more easily picked up by spam filters. Always ask your subscribers to add your email address to their white list, if they are using a spam filter.

As with all methods of Website promotion, if you don't track your results, you've no idea of your reach. The subscriber base is only a very crude metric in determining what you're achieving: many subscribers are dormant; they don't read your mailing, have blocked you as a sender or don't realise that the mailing gets caught in the ever fines mesh of spam filter nets.

The two main metrics for measuring your newsletter's success are opens and clickthroughs.

Opens simply refers to the number of recipients that actually open the email, usually expressed as a percentage of the actual mail shot. Opens can be measured relatively easily by means of a tracking pixel. Simply add an invisible 1x1 pixel high up in the copy of your mailing (right below the BODY tag). FTP the pixel to a folder on your server. Now every time a recipient opens an email, the pixel will be pulled for the server, showing up in your web logs as a hit. Obviously this method only works with HTML or RTF formatted email because you can't embed images in plain text email.

Clickthroughs are usually measured by means of a link tracker. Using tracker URLs, rather than direct URLs, you will be able to count the number of clicks each link actually receives. Link trackers can be used to track clicks to any links, in any Website promotion technique, so it's a general purpose tool and not limited to newsletter or other forms of email marketing (see Toolbox, left).