Anne Holland

The most popular newsletters include a personal note

October 21st, 2002

Many of you have asked, “Why isn’t your Blog part of your main site?”

Well, from the start I figured it was best to keep a church and state separation between our editorial content. MarketingSherpa’s various “Official” newsletters (six of them now) are written by various members of our editorial team (myself, Senior Reporter Catherine Getches, Contributing Editor Mark Brownlow, and Tech Editor Alexis Gutzman). They are very factual, based on in-depth interviews with the marketers we cover. I worried that a first-person opinion Blog by mainly just me, would give you the wrong impression of the rest of the stories.

Well, last week I learned I was wrong. At our Newsletter Publishers’ Workshop, I learned that people really like to have a personal note included along with their more formal articles. I learned the most popular newsletters include both kinds of editorial.

As we drove back to the airport after the show, Alexis turned to me and said, “Well that’s it. You should move SherpaBlog into the SherpaWeekly newsletter. It can be the first part of each week’s issue. Kind of like a hostess welcoming you to a party. You’ll go and mingle with the other guests later, but first you want a personal note.”

I know a smart idea when I hear one, so that’s what will happen. Instead of dashing off a note whenever here at odd hours, I’ll do a Blog/letter in SherpaWeekly each Thursday morning.

This means if you’re a SherpaBlog subscriber, you won’t get any more issues. It doesn’t make much sense to email out a Blog separately. In the old print publishing days I would have said, “We’ve merged the two lists together and you’ll get the Weekly automatically.” But in this brave new permission world, it doesn’t seem right anymore to do that. Instead it’s entirely up to you.

If you’d like to continue getting my Blog emailed to you, just sign up for SherpaWeekly. It’s quick, it’s easy, you can get off the list with one click anytime, and no, we never ever rent or share email addresses with other marketers. Thanks for your support.

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