While setting up a website is a passive way of providing information to customers, sometimes you want to be more active in informing current customers and potential customers of new releases or other breaking news. Two ways to do this are via an email announcement group or a blog.
While maintaining an email list of customers and sending periodic messages can be done, many ISPs and WSPs limit the number of recipients any one message can be sent to, and some customers may not recognize the message coming from you and could mark it as SPAM, blacklisting your email and marking your domain/IP address as a source of SPAM. It can be time consuming to maintain the list with changes of address and the bounces that may come from customers not informing you of changes. And keep updated with the CAN-SPAM Act regulations.
There are a number of free email list systems, one of the most popular is Yahoo!Groups. You can set up an announcement-only list, a moderated discussion list or a non-moderated discussion list within minutes and invite all your customers to join. A how to introduction can be found here. There is no limit to the number of participants of a list; you can control/limit who gets added. While free, there are embedded advertisements to offset the expenses. There are many folks already using Yahoo!Groups, so it’s simple for them to add another group; and making the group’s description public is another way of finding potential customers who might be browsing/searching.
To have an advertisement-free mailing list, you’ll have to go to a paid service, like Lyris.
Another way of reaching out to customers is to have a blog. Most blog sites can be accessed by surfing the web (passively), or via email or RSS announcement of new post (actively).
Some WSPs do provide RSS/blog services either as part of their basic pricing or as extension. In addition, there are many free blog sites available. Some of the more common blog sites in use by artists include blogger.com (Google’s free blogs), blogspot.com, typepad.com.
An advantage to including it as part of your WSP functionality is that it will have your vanity domain included (i.e., news.myvanitydomain.com or myvanitydomain.com/news/), whereas using a free service will change the domain (i.e., mystudionamenews.blogger.com)
Back up to Library
Return to the Model Horse Gallery Home Page
This page maintained by the Model Horse Gallery Curator ©1996-2020