Your site visitors care about one thing - how you can help them get what they want.  They don't want to read all kinds of long, boring prose about how great your company is or it's history, nor do they want to have to give you their name and email just to be able to view more information about your products or services.  Your visitors want a solution to their problem - whether they're looking to buy a product online, or whether they just want a good laugh from your joke of the day.  Don't scare them away by demanding information from them before they're ready to provide it to help themselves.

I thought the following pretty much went the way of the 90's, but recently I was researching a product and ending up on a major company's website, only to find that I couldn't even reach the product information page without encountering "let us know who your are!"  Well....NO!  I immediately left the site and returned to Google, and the company lost a sale to another site.  There are too many competitors out there for you to alienate potential customers by demanding information from them before you've earned it.

If you aren't familiar with QR codes, I can pretty much guarantee that you've seen them around and just didn't know what they were.  QR (Quick Response) codes are similar to bar codes but can hold much more data; they enable you to pass along information to clients and prospective clients who are able to scan them with a QR code reader, usually a smart phone.  The codes can hold data such as: a web url, contact information (vcard), a Google maps location, and SMS message composers.  The sample at right contains the url to this website:  http://www.glerin.com.

Face it, we're all bombarded with too much information today and the last thing we want to do is read more of it - UNLESS there's something in it for us!  If you want to make sure that your subscribers read your newsletters, and maybe even pass them along to their friends, you should concentrate on providing helpful or fun information rather than dragging on about your company and how great it is - BORING!

Newsletters aren't so much about promotion as they are about creating and maintaining relationships with your customers.  By providing helpful or fun content, you'll make your readers look forward to the next issue rather than just deleting it unread from their inbox - or worse yet, unsubscribing themselves from the newsletter.  Which brings me to another point: your newsletter should always include an Unsubscribe link; not only is it rude not to do so, it's actually illegal.