Newsletter? 
A newsletter is a great way of keeping existing and potential clients up to date about your activities. Before you start however, you should think about whether you regularly have something interesting to say. A newsletter that brings no added value to its subscribers can do your corporate image more harm than good. What's interesting to your subscribers depends on your activities: new articles on your site certainly qualify but also revised price lists, interesting promotional offers or useful tips for getting the most out of your products are newsletter material.

Getting people to subscribe
A newsletter is no longer a 'hot item' on the Internet. These days, it takes more than the adjective 'FREE' to convince users to subscribe to your newsletter, you have to let people know what they can expect when they subscribe. 
Content. The most important thing is to tell users what the newsletter is about. Which kind of information does it contain? What's the advantage of getting this information through the newsletter? You can tell users in a short sentence like 'Subscribe to our newsletter and be the first to know about new promotions' or use a more lengthy explanation. An additional incentive for people to subscribe can be that you include content in your newsletter that isn't available on the site or that newsletter subscribers get an extra discount. To show users exactly what they can expect, you can offer a link to a past newsletter like Auto-on-net.com (http://www.auto-on-net.com) does.
Periodicity. The average user not only wants to know what type of content he can expect, he also wants to know how often he will receive your newsletter. Indicate clearly whether your newsletter appears daily, weekly, monthly or x times per year. Adding just one word to our previous example sentence gives users a lot of extra information: 'Subscribe to our monthly newsletter and be the first to know about new promotions'. 
Homepage. The homepage is the most important and most visited page of your site, which makes it the ideal place to promote your newsletter. Don't use a flashy button or banner, a short, attractive sentence that says what your newsletter has to offer and why users should subscribe is much more efficient. You can either provide an email field and a 'Subscribe' button or offer a link to a subscription page.

Els Aerts & Karl Gilis