In this age of blogs, YouTube videos and social-media networks, you may be wondering if it is still worth doing an email newsletter. The “right” answer for your business will depend on a number of factors, but generally speaking there are at least five good reasons why you should still consider having an email newsletter.
Expanding your reach
First, let’s not forget that even if social media networks such as Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter are gaining in popularity everyday, not everyone has a social-media account or reads blogs on a regular basis, whereas pretty much everyone has an email address. Without an email newsletter, you are therefore limiting your reach to a smaller target audience.
Control
Second, email newsletters may be more effective to communicate specific types of messages. In fact, email newsletters are notoriously effective for lead nurturing or to communicate special promotions or account reminders to existing customers, whereas this type of communication may be inappropriate on a blog. Having an email newsletter simply gives you more options to choose from for different types of messages.
List segmentation
Third, an email newsletter is an effective way to build, maintain and segment an email list. This is particularly useful if you cater to the needs of completely different audiences, because sending the same communication at large will simply decrease its effectiveness. A better approach consists of offering different content tracks for your email newsletter, and proper list segmentation will go a long way to increase the relevancy of your message.
A/B testing
Fourth, email newsletters are the ideal means to easily and inexpensively test different marketing strategies. Whether you use a marketing automation platform or a service like AWeber, you can set up your email newsletter to be sent in a specific order (article 1, then article 2, etc.) or to subscribers that fit a specific profile. Alternatively, you could also decide to test a message on a smaller audience before sending it to your broader list, whereas once something is on your blog, you can hardly take it back.
Tracking
Fifth, the ease with which you can track and analyze the effectiveness of an email newsletter is hard to beat. Most email broadcasting tools such as ConstantContact, CampaignMonitor or MailChimp report on the number of emails sent, the number of emails received, who opened your email newsletter and when, the number of click-throughs, etc. This instant feedback is invaluable to refine the relevancy of your marketing communications.
How you’ll know for sure
The only way for you to know for sure if you should keep your email newsletter or create a new one is to test it and as you do, you will probably realize that blogs, social-media networks and email newsletters are not conflicting communications strategies but complementary ones that serve different purposes. So, the real issue may not be whether it is still worth doing an email newsletter but how you can better integrate your email newsletter with your other marketing initiatives, be they social-media networks, mobile marketing, search engine optimization or even teleprospecting.
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