Our latest publication is also a newsletter—IRNewsLink—but it
is vastly different from our first, and the difference reflects the massive
changes in trade publishing and direct marketing that the Internet has wrought.
IRNewsLink is transmitted via e-mail to the desktops of its opt-in subscribers
twice each week when the news is still new, and it is free of charge to any
qualified subscriber in the Internet retailing industry who requests a subscription.
Because the letter that is transmitted only summarizes each article and contains
a link to the full text of the article posted on our web site (internetretailer.com),
IRN can and does carry 50 or more news stories and press releases related to
e-commerce in retailing in each issue, easily four times the amount of text
printed in the old Bank Network News.
This combination has made IRNewsLink hugely attractive to retail and
catalog executives who look to the newsletter for the latest information on
the use of the Internet in retailing. Since its introduction just 14 months
ago, IRN has signed up 16,500 opt-in subscribers—a base that would have
been unattainable using the pre-Internet model of newsletter publishing. Because
of the size and quality of the list and the ability for sponsors to use the
newsletter to interact with prospective customers, IRNewsLink has become
an extremely popular promotional vehicle for our advertising clients. That,
in turn, allows us to invest even more editorial and marketing resources to
further enhance IRN’s editorial content and subscription base. Even now,
the newsletter continues to add more than 500 subscribers a month and is easily
on track to exceed 20,000 by the end of the year.
The newsletter’s astonishing popularity is part of a broader trend in publishing and marketing that has made the e-mail address the new coin of the direct-marketing realm. Indeed, e-mail has quickly become the most effective new marketing tool since the introduction of network television more than 50 years ago. As this month’s supplement on the topic reports, there were 300 billion e-mails transmitted last year, a number that is expected to double in 2005. More significant, the number of marketing e-mails is expected to grow from 51 billion last year to 240 billion in 2005. In our industry, the frequent and creative use of e-mail marketing is a major factor explaining the success of leading retail web sites.
But for e-mail campaigns to achieve their full potential, they must be opt-in
programs from trusted sources. They must also offer substantial value and communicate
a targeted message to a targeted audience ready to receive that message. That
credo has been a key to IRNewsLink’s success, and we will continue to
adhere to it as we expand this important news service.
Jack Love
Publisher
P.S. If you don’t already receive America’s #1 e-mail newsletter for retailers
and catalogers, you can subscribe by logging on to clicking
here. The IRN subscription form is accessed in the upper right corner of
the home page.
