Is This Thing On?

Is This Thing On?
Or, How Do You Know if Anyone is Reading Your Newsletter?

by Jim Schulte
copyright (c) 2003

It seems that every hour a new ezine or newsletter shows up
on the Internet. They are endless in titles and content.
Everybody has to have one to be successful with the program,
product, or service they are offering the millions of
"Internet Junkies" in oder to be able to quit their day
jobs.

I don't know who came up with the idea that a newsletter or
ezine was an essential document in online marketing, but it
appears that "they" were correct in that assumption. If you
don't have a vehicle in which to get your product to market,
then you won't have a market in which to sell your product.

Herein lies the question that many, if not all publishers
and editors alike, cannot seem to answer. How do you know if
anyone is reading your publication?

If you belong to any of the ad co-ops you know that you get
subscribers on a daily basis. You watch your active
subscriber count rise on a weekly basis, and your list
server gives you endless pie charts that show first time
visitors, repeat visitors, most recent visitors, pending
subs, active subs, on and on and on.

None of that information tells you if any of those people
are reading your newsletter. You know, the one you slave
over day after day, week after week, trying to give all of
those subs the best you can. So here is the question again.
How do you know they are reading your publication?

The truthful answer to that question is, you really don't
know. Unfortunately, in this day and age when we can see an
ant colony eating all of the goodies at the annual Martian
company picnic, there is no miracle software (not yet
anyway) that can tell us if anybody is reading all of these
ezines.

It seems like such a simple task doesn't it? Why can't we
have a sign like Mcdonalds that says, "Over One Billion Read
Your Newsletter Today". Radio and television stations have a
ratings book that tell them how many people are watching and
listening to their shows. So why can't we find out how many
people are reading our newsletters?

I recently did a survey of publishers with less than 200
subs, and ones with 10,000 plus. They all said the same
thing. I don't know how many people read my publication.

They did however offer ideas on how to get a handle on how
many are really reading what you put out on a daily, weekly,
or monthly basis. Some try offering free reports, or
information, that always brings out the quiet ones.

One publisher offered this explanation. "I sent out my
latest ezine, and minutes later I had 12 new leads that I
was certain had to come from ezine readers because of the
offer I was making". That only told him that 12 people read
his offer. But how many readers don't respond to these
types of offers, and how do you know THEY are reading the
newsletter?

The bottom line to this whole thing is that no one really
and truly knows how many people read the ezines and
newsletters of the world. I thought that Terri Seymour hit
the nail on the head with this quote "I do not know of a way
to track the actual reading of an ezine, but I would love to
find one".

I say all of the publishers of the world should just keep
banging away on their keyboards and put out the best damn
publication they can. When you have no more subscribers,
then scrap the whole ezine newsletter idea.

This could be a very hard thing for publishers to do however,
because how will they know if they have lost all of their
subscribers, when nobody knows how many subscribers read their
newsletters in the first place.

Jim Schulte
Editor I.M.J. Newsletter
http://www.imjpads.com/mycustompage0013.htm

Creator I.M.J. Mouse Pads
http://www.imjpads.com