Hello There,
Do any of you hosts send out newsletters to your clients? If so how often? Is there a set date for the newsletter or is it just when you make a change that affect your clients directly?

I'm also looking for some decent software to help me manage this anyone any ideas?

Also feel free to post your opinions on the effectiveness of newsletter (not necessarily financially but to boost customer confidence etc)
Regards,

Naeem|THB,

Do we send our newseltters now? No How often did we send out newsletters? Once a month, when major updates would, or scheduled downtime. We will be sending out newsletter once again shortly in conjunction with our news section.

I had a wonderful software that I use to use; however, I do not remember then name. If I find it I will let you know.

On the other site that we use to send newsletters out with it was a great way to gain customers. They use to e-mail me trying to find a sneak peek of what was coming in it.

If you right a good newsletter it will go along way in retaining customers.

I dont send newsletter to my clients, because I know when I get newsletters from certain companies or whatever, I just delete them and find them annoying. I do send letters from time to time though when major things happen.

If you are sending out a newsletter, I think the client should be able to decide whether he or she wants to receive it, unless it is an important update to your policy or services. When sending out your newsletter, be sure to comply with the CAN-SPAM Act.

I know of ListCast, which offers a free plan that you may want to check out.

We dont send out newsletters, although it would be a nice thing to add, but I prefer to spend the time to manage/write a newsletter on support/advertising

Regards

No I don't send out newsletters. I tend to think Our Forums will keep everyone posted and updated on small, medium and critical issues.

We send out very small text based newsletter occassionally.

We use GroupMail, by infact.com

Thanks for the suggestions guys, Ill look into them
Regards

Newsletters are a great way to keep clients updated on new offers or other news of interest. Make them informative and your clients will keep reading them each time you send them out.

No newsletters are distributed here. We hope that people will stay up to date by reading the forums and reading the news from out helpdesk .

I know that all newsletters I received I just delete. I don't have time to read them.

Matt

We will be sending out newsletters soon. Each customer will have the choice whether they want to join or not. I am still looking into the software we will be using, I feel that this will allow customers an extra when hosting with us.

Well as I said, infacta.com offers GroupMail. It is a desktop application, and probably one of the best i have found.

They have plugins for subscription opt-in and out. You can send HTML emails, etc and personalize each email automatically...even the HTML ones.

Newsletters are hard to plan on a regular basis because customers almost expect it once you start sending it out. Often it takes several months to organize something new and customers start to wonder if something is actually being done to improve service.

On the plus side it's an easy way to let current customers know of any specials or promotions we have going around.

I do not send out newsletters from my hosting site but I do have a contest site that I do send out weekly newletters from. I don't think I could come up with enough new information to send out a newsletter from my hosting site. But the software that I use on my other site is pretty good. It is a double op-in program that you can get for free if you only have one newsletter and want to send it out in text. There is a subscribe page or box that you can put on your site. The software is called subscribe2me. Take a look at it I like it and you cant beat the price if you only need one list and use text newsletters.

100% Agree its one of the oldest and one of the best practices of internet marketing.

Having a good communication with your clients is very important, If you can provide them with informative content, freebies , new deals, features and service upgrades, TOS updates etc etc

And when it comes to the frequency of the news later, i think the best would be once every 2 weeks or once every month, coz as someone earlier said, If you send you news letter 3-4 times week, then it can be a pain to the client and there's a great chance of having your news letter mark as spam or unsubscribe from your news later for good

So having a news latter is very good but make sure to have the news letter frequency in a low level