Benefits of newsletters?

[Promaginy]

Hi all,

I can see that newsletters are important for existing customers (those who purchased a game) but can it create new customers?

Are your lists made up of people who are just interested in the game(s) but have not purchased anything? Any sense of the ratio of people who are just "lurking" and those who actually purchased a game?

What are the best methods to get these "lurkers" to make a purchase?

[Red Marble Games]

Newsletters are indispensable, and that's why everyone on this board seems to have one. Its first priority is marketing new titles to old customers, that's true, but every email address you get from a "lurker" is worth something to you: that's a potential customer who has expressed enough interest in what you're offering that s/he won't consider your email pimping of your game to be spam. That's a pretty valuable thing, IMHO.

And yes, the proportion of people who sign up without purchasing is very small compared to people who leave the "Contact Me" box checked when ordering, but they're still valuable. Much of this business is about reaching people, and I still get a little riff of satisfaction every time I get to add a new email address to my collection.

[Promaginy]

Much of this business is about reaching people, and I still get a little riff of satisfaction every time I get to add a new email address to my collection.

Thanks for the answer! How about a technical one then... do you manage your own mailing list or use a service?

[Red Marble Games]

I do my own; it's really just a matter of putting the content together and adding everyone's name to a bc: list. But I know many others on these boards use yourmailinglistprovider or other services, and I can't really speak to what they think the advantages might be.

[svero]

When your list gets large enough there are a lot of hassles involved in doing it yourself. For instance, even if people signed up legitimately, they still sometimes complain that you're spamming them, and that can lead to your isp shutting you down or spamcop blocking you, and you have to go through the hassle of dealing with and undoing all those little details yourself. There are other reasons but I think that's one of the main ones. Normally someone with a large list doing it themselves will run a separate mail server on another domain as well. For small lists it may actually be more costly to do it in a safe way. There's a lot of overreaction because of the amount of truly unscollicited bad spam going around.

[otaku]

Personal recommendation:

Polls, mailing list, counters, blog, news, news letter, email forms, etc.

http://www.webwizguide.info/

It costs about $200 for the entire "studio" though you can purchase separate items. The demo version is functionally complete but includes a copyright notice & link back the webwiz website.

Just needs to include some forum software and it'd be "perfect." :)