choosing an email strategy

There are a lot of different ways to use email. Some sites send occasional chatty emails and others deliver automated, personalized stock portfolios several times each day.

Your strategy will vary greatly depending on your site's focus and goals. But whatever the level of investment, email delivers. When done correctly with respect for the user, attention to detail, and a willingness to experiment email can work wonders just short of a miracle for your site.

1. newsletters

If people were interested enough to come to your site once, they may want to stay informed over time. Whether you're a choreographer for a hip-hop dance troupe or a scientist researching mating practices of pandas in captivity, there are people out in the world who care about what you do. That's why they visited your site in the first place.

Email newsletters are a great way to build a sense of belonging: By receiving news from your organization, people begin to feel more and more invested in the community. Even if they only give it an occasional glance, its appearance in their In-Box reinforces the bond.

basic newsletters The most basic newsletter simply updates recipients on the goings-on in your organization or web site, pointing them to where they can learn more. The frequency of the newsletter depends on how much you have to say and how much your members care. Most people won't require a daily (or even weekly) update on your progress, but a simple newsletter distributed monthly or quarterly can help build a dedicated audience (or customer base, or research community) for your organization.

targeted newsletters Targeted newsletters add extra value to users by addressing the topics of specific interest to them. BabyCenter, for instance, sends specialized weekly newsletters to expectant mothers, telling them what's happening at each stage of their baby's development, based on their due date.

2. headlines

Used primarily by news (and other content) sites, headline emails give subscribers a summary of the day's news, with links leading back to each full story on the site.

While basic, these mailings are exceptionally effective, delivering up to 50% of daily traffic to many news sites. They're especially economical, because they can be generated automatically from most content-management systems and require little, if any, individual attention once they're created.

3. bite-size content

Another approach to email is to send bite-size content: jokes, tips, recommended sites, excerpts from discussion boards, or anything else that can be divvied up into tempting little tidbits and delivered to someone's In-Box each day.

4. customized reports

Customized reports go one step further on the value chain. They deliver subscribers highly targeted, timely information on specific topics.

Customized reports include

• The stock portfolio. The most common example of a customized report is the stock portfolio. Most finance sites allow you to create a custom portfolio that tracks your stocks. Each day, at market's close, you receive a report showing how your stocks did that day and even tallying the value of your portfolio.

• The news tracker. Some news sites, like The New York Times, let you create custom news-trackers (sometimes called agents or bots) that notify you via email whenever an article on a certain topic appears.

• The shopping bot. Many commerce sites will send you alerts when a particular product becomes available or prices begin to drop on an item you want. Christie's auction house offers an email service that notifies collectors whenever a piece by a particular artist comes to auction anywhere in the world. And used bookstores will notify users whenever a desired book is located.

5. announcements

Whether you're announcing a rock concert, an end-of-season sale on gas grills, or an activist campaign against exploratory drilling in Red Rock canyon, email gets the word out quickly and cheaply.

Announcements include

• Event updates. Email is a great tool for announcing upcoming events, reminding people as the date nears, and letting them know about last-minute changes. Email updates are now a staple among independent musicians, who often collect addresses at live gigs and let fans know when they're coming back to town. But it isn't just for indie bands. All sorts of organizations from local libraries to professional sports teams use email to announce events.

• The "sale!" email. A direct descendent of direct mail, the "sale!" email does just what it says: Informs the user about sales or discounts available on the site. As in traditional retail, the goal is to bring the customers back in and encourage them to buy the sale items and other full-ticket products as well.

• The activist alert. Now a tried-and-true staple among the activist set, alert emails go out to concerned, like-minded people whenever a critical issue arises. The power of email is not just in getting the word out (which it does quickly and cheaply) but giving armchair activists easy and immediate ways to take action: By emailing a politician or company, forwarding an email petition, printing and sending a letter, or following a link to a web page.

6. many-to-many lists

All the other email strategies mentioned here are "one-to-many" (or in some cases, one-to-one) mailing lists. As the site and list owner, you send information to the recipients, but they only have limited ways to talk back to you. And they can't talk to each other. Which, frankly, is just the way most site owners want it.

But at some time or another, many site owners catch the "community" bug, and decide to launch a many-to-many list to build community around their product or organization. But I'd think twice about this, if I were you. Many-to-many mailing lists are tremendous as a cultural force and information source, but there are very few happy stories about their use as a marketing medium. Most mailing list communities take on a life of their own. They don't take kindly to being marketed to and often wish to distance themselves from the group that gave them their start. There are a few successful stories of developer lists and users groups within the software industry. Apple and Adobe, for example, have very successful user-to-user help systems. But most other stories I've heard have ended in tears.