Gail,
In Bury we have been running an e-newsletter for 2 and a half years, and
it is a bi monthly publication. Our newsletter is a single newsletter
covering Arts, Libraries and Adult Learning Newsletter mainly due to our
departmental make up.
We use some mailing software written by our ICT developers which mails
an extract from our LMS.
We have set our LMS to email borrowers library notices (overdues,
reservation notices, courtesy notices etc). When someone joins a library
with an email or adds / changes an email to their library record we send
out a "Welcome email", which checks that the email address is valid,
outlines our usage policy for emails (notices and our e-newsletter) and
gives people the option to opt-out of the newsletter at that stage. Also
on our newsletters there is an opt out email link at the bottom. We use
one of fixed length fields in our borrower record on the LMS as a "NO
SPAM" field. So that the LMS record is the master record for our
newsletter.
I am not on the editorial team so I do not know how much time it takes
them to compile the newsletter, but they start looking for articles
pretty much as soon as one is sent out. We get about a weeks turnaround
from the corporate communications to convert the word document into our
e-newsletter template and then it takes about a day for me to fix the
html (the template was designed for internal email via outlook) and
email them out.
The last newsletter went to ~ 12600 unique email addresses. From this I
received about 70 email bounces (The ezine is a good way of keeping a
check on your borrowers email addresses) 25 Unsubscribe emails (1 of
which was to tell me they had a new email address) and 4 subscribe
emails. Also received a few hundred out of offices.
What I have learnt, is that you have to be clear about what your
newsletter is about and stick to it. Ours came from a desire to use our
borrowers email addresses as a direct marketing tool balanced against a
reluctance to alienate people who have given us their email address for
library notices. A regular newsletter (with opt-outs) seemed to be the
best way to acomplish this. Other council departments have asked to use
our emails for their marketing, but this is not in our usage policy so
we have refused and have been backed up by our corporate communications
team. We will however, put short promotions (accompanied by links) in
our newsletter for other council services, if we think our readers would
be interested. But the regular newsletter is the only form of
non-library notice communication to our borrowers email addresses. In
the winter 2010-2011 we did send a couple of "special edition"
newsletters to warn users of emergency closures due to snow, for speed
these bypassed corporate communications and used a much simpler
template, but were still recognisable by their branding.
HTH
Alan
--
Alan Brown
Library Systems Liaison Officer
Bury Libraries
Resource Services
Textile Hall
Manchester Rd
Bury BL9 0DG
0161 253 5877
http://www.bury.gov.uk/libraries
http://library.bury.gov.uk
________________________________
From: Gail Holmes [mailto:[log in to unmask]]
Sent: 27 March 2012 13:43
Subject: e-newsletters
Hello
I'd be grateful for any shared experience in producing a library
e-newsletter, particularly with regards to the following:
* Software used and how it interacts with your Library Management
System
* How people are given the option to opt out?
* How many people receive your newsletter?
* How often do you send them out?
* Do you have one newsletter for all things Libraries, or a series
of newsletters for different interest areas, such as Local History?
* How much staff time does each issue take to compile and send
out?
I already have information from Newcastle - thanks very much
Best regards
Gail
------------------------------------------
Gail Holmes
Multimedia Librarian
Libraries & Arts
Community Based Services
Gateshead Council
www.gateshead.gov.uk/soundgallery
<file://www.gateshead.gov.uk/soundgallery>
Tel: 0191 433 8441
Fax: 0191 433 8424
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