5 Reasons Why You Still Need an Email Newsletter

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, whereas pretty much everyone has an email address.

Also, on social media the algorithm pretty much decides who sees what.

An email newsletter allows you to broaden your reach. 

Control

Second, email newsletters may be more effective to communicate specific types of messages.

In fact, email newsletters are notoriously effective to communicate special promotions and all kinds of personalized messages, such as exclusive invitations to events, or tips to better use your products.

Having an email newsletter simply gives you more distribution options.

List segmentation

Third, an email newsletter is an effective way to increase the relevancy of your message.

Most companies send the same newsletter to all subscribers, but you can achieve so much more when you segment your list by client type, industry, or other criteria and offer different content tracks.

A/B testing

Fourth, email newsletters allow you to easily and inexpensively test different messages.

Take a portion of your list and split it into two groups. Send message A to the first group and message B to the second group. The results will help you decide which one should be sent to your broader list.

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 provide detailed reports, but this information is mostly helpful to improve the relevancy of your newsletter and eventually change the broadcasting day and time.

It is far better to measure the real impact of your newsletter on revenue. For that, proceed with a reverse analysis. When you look at this month’s sales report, can you tell which subscribers were actually reading your newsletter?

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.