Email Marketing Ezines: How it all Began

Online magazines or ezines are a relatively recent addition to the information sources on the internet. In the old days of the internet, many information service providers distinguished themselves from the big business entities in the offline world, and, in an almost anarchical way, propagated information in some kind of a magazine form. Some information service providers had only an online presence and sought the use of the ezine to become online magazines. The first successful venture in this regard was by an entrepreneur called David Talbot. The same venture that he began in 1995 now boasts almost 6 million users monthly.

Email marketing ezines are another appellation for the more descriptive newsletter marketing. This is a technique that is more user friendly than the usual bulk email marketing route and offers information as the primary offering and the sales offer as something that is more incidental. This is something that actually began since the first advertisements were placed in the very first online magazines. However, this is a crude and unrefined method of newsletter marketing. Ideally, an ezine that is aimed at marketing should be created in quite a different way.

Ezines for email marketing should be created much like a newsletter is created. This also means that the same governing objective of a newsletter, which is information dissemination, should be the objective of the marketing ezine; however, there is a slight difference in the topics. Your topics and your content should be geared towards trying to elicit a sale. This can be demonstrated with the help of an example: assume that you are a pharmacist. During the course of the year comes a time when the flu tends to be the most; therefore, this becomes the main anchor of your content. Somewhere in the content you would probably also state that the best cure for some types of flu is the drug ocetalamvir – Tamiflu. From here, it is a simple matter of inserting a link to a landing page on your main website that sells the drug.

This is the method that is used by nearly all entities in the practice of marketing through the medium of email by using the ezine route. However, the problem is that this type of method is more copy intensive and an investment into copy must be made. It is probably for this very reason that this mode of communication has not caught on to all levels.

Ezine email marketing is subject to the same constraints as regular marketing emails – most notably, the spam filter. This is a problem that again has to be addressed by good copy and following non-spam practices. It is also important to understand that you should stay away from sales spiel at all times in your email. This is because most of the phrasing in spiel is easily identified as spam. Of course, if you have acquired your email addresses after recipients have opted-in, a spam filter is not something that you have to worry about.