It is incredible how successful online newsletters are!… It may sound like an unusual statement, coming from the publisher of a printed magazine, but is is absolutely true. Job in Tourism started operating in February 1998, and in those times (it seems like ages ago) publishing – in general – was only on paper. Immediately, in order to compensate for the inefficiencies of postal distribution, we activated the website www.jobintourism.it which – thanks to the Internet’s increasing visibility – has turned into an important tool (with 500,000 pages currently being viewed every month). Our newsletter was created at a later stage, little more than a year ago, mainly in order to find out our visitors’ degree of attachment to the website, more than with an intention to really promote it. The number of registrations (a procedure that starts from the site homepage) immediately turned out to be quite high – 16,000 in one year.
What is most significant, however, is not so much how this operation evolved, or the number of visitors, but the return it produces. Publishing a newspaper is a rather demanding job; keeping a website updated and easy to consult requires a great amount of energy; issuing a newsletter is much easier and yields immediate returns in terms of efficacy, definitely outstanding in proportion to the effort required. The very fact that communication is immediately channelled to the computer of the person concerned makes this tool immediately effective and easy to consult.
Initially, as this solution was developing spontaneously, we did a few tests to find out what the best way of communicating might be. We registered to receive several newsletters on tourism, both Italian and foreign, and we quickly identified a simple way to communicate.
What strikes me most, however, is not so much the constantly increasing number of registered readers, or the absolutely negligible number of people who cancel their registrations (there is a legal obligation to allow for easy cancellation: with us, you can cancel with a click), but rather the amount of attention that is given to the news and the proposals contained in the message. One of the surprising effects (considering that everybody who receives our newsletter already knows our website, as that is where they registered from) is that the day after every newsletter issue the number of www.jobintourism.it visitors is literally doubled, before going back to the usual standard on later days. We take three hours a week to prepare the newsletter, and I can assure you that it is the time best – or at least most profitably – spent.
Those who do not yet do so, should consider whether it is not worth creating a newsletter as a house organ. Our suggestion is to start immediately, because – as always happens – after a period of fast growth, only the best will remain – those with the most valuable content and the soundest bases.
Translation of the Italian
editorial by Paola Praloran
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