The success of your newsletter in the long term will be determined by its ability to retain existing customers and convert prospects into new customers. To do this effectively, you should seek to address your subscribers personally and provide content that matches closely to their interests. A personal greeting (e.g., Dear Bob) grabs their attention and timely, well-written articles keep it.

Your newsletter service provider should offer a series of personalization features that allow newsletters to be custom tailored for each subscriber, so that they incorporate personal information and articles that are most relevant to their interests. In addition, personalization opportunities should not be limited to just the email that is delivered. Personalization should extend to all of the pages of a companion Web site (the landing page) and to auto-response messages.

Collecting Personal Information

The process starts by building a database of subscriber information. You may already have this data stored within your corporate database or you may wish to collect this information through an online form located on your Web site.

Importing Subscriber Data
In addition to an email address, you can import a name, address, phone, and lots of other demographic information associated with your subscribers. This is done by uploading and importing a tab separated ASCII text file from your computer. Each line of this file should contain a single subscriber record, with each piece of information (i.e., data field) separated by a TAB. One easy way to prepare a file like this is to first load your subscriber data into Microsoft Excel and then save this data as a Tab Separated file.

Collecting Data from a Web Site
It is also important to collect subscriber information when people visit your Web site. This information can be filled through a Web form that connects directly back to the subscriber database in your Newsletter account. Along with an email address you can collect name, address, phone, and lots of other demographic information. This Web form can be designed through a WYSIWYG HTML form editor available through the Subscription Builder feature. When it is complete, the complete HTML for this form can be obtained so that it can be copied and pasted anywhere on your Web site.

Delivering Personalized Information

The best way to get someone to respond to an email is to make it very personal. Newsletter personalization can occur in several ways. It can include specific information stored in the subscriber database like their name, their city, or their account number. It can also include content that is filtered according to their preferences or demographics. For example, people from Massachusetts would see one article and people from New York would see another.

Merging Personal Information – The "Dear John" Letter
Traditionally known by direct marketers as mail merge, the concept of marrying a database of names and addresses with a pre-defined letter template has been around for almost a century. This same technique can be employed with a newsletter, allowing personal subscriber information to be embedded anywhere within the title, headlines, or body text of the emailed document. Special tokens determine where this information will appear. They can be placed in the subject line of the email, the title of an article, or can be in the middle of a sentence anywhere in the text. If information for a particular subscriber record is missing, special replacement text can be used. For example, the text “Dear [ [FIRSTNAME OR ‘Customer’] ], “ will display the first name of the subscriber. If the FIRSTNAME field of the subscriber record is empty, the word ‘Customer’ will be shown instead.

Dynamic Customized Content
The contents of each newsletter delivered by email can also be customized for each subscriber depending upon their demographics or interests. This is done by defining Display Rules for particular articles and/or layout elements. For example, if the subscriber to a travel newsletter were from the state of Massachusetts, an article about Boston hotels would be shown and if the subscriber were from California, an article about Los Angeles would be shown. Display Rules are conditional statements (i.e., yes/no questions) that are either True or False.

Personalized and Dynamic Micro-Site

One of the unique features about your Newsletter account is the companion micro-site that comes with it. The micro-site provides a landing page for your Newsletter (or marketing campaign) at your own private newsletter address. It allows you to measure the interests of your subscribers as they move from email to the Web and from one article to another.

The micro-site is powerful because it is not just a collection of static pages. Each page within your micro-site can also be completely personalized and customized for each identified subscriber. This allows the personalized experience to extend beyond the email to one or more dynamically generated Web pages. This is ideal for revealing additional information to a particular subscriber, collecting additional personal information, and displaying appropriate and targeted content. A personalized micro-site provides many exciting possibilities like this for establishing a one-to-one dialog with your subscribers.

Personalized Auto-Response