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Nick Pauley, managing director of Shortburst, explains why e-newsletters are beneficial for business.
Do I need an email newsletter?
This is the question that millions of small businesses are probably asking themselves daily.
E-newsletters have become prolific in the past couple of years and any business not producing a regular electronic update about their goods or services must be wondering if they are missing out.
Electronic communication has made it possible for anybody to send email messages to a great number of people simultaneously. It has lowered the cost of producing and delivering newsletters to a price that even the smallest business can afford.
Let’s examine first the benefits of using email to broadcast messages. Emails go usually to named individuals within an organisation and land in their in-boxes. This means that as long as they are not stopped by firewalls or spam filters along the way, they will reach specific people. They don’t go like a letter first to the post room, where they might be opened and discarded, where the address label may be lost or where they may be misdirected.
Emails save time, save trees, save pollution and as we ponder the warming of this planet I think we can all agree that the greener our communication the better. Marketing by email can decrease the cost of acquiring customers and be a cost-effective way to maintain interest in your goods and services over long periods.
There is no way that you can track customer receipt of printed campaigns as effectively as you can with emailed marketing. Unless you are going to undertake an audit by telephone or send paper-based marketing by recorded delivery, you will never know who actually received your information. You will certainly never know who read it. You will never know whether it was sent elsewhere and whether anyone else read it. Furthermore you won’t know which particular content was of most interest to which recipient. All this statistical data can be obtained easily and effectively only by email marketing.
Email is one of the easiest and cheapest way to maintain contact with existing and prospective customers or members of your organisation. It can enable you to get new customers, to turn enquiries into leads, to educate readers about your good or services and to cement the relationships that you have and build trust, thereby establishing your organisation as highly reputable.
However in order to establish and maintain a good reputation, you must ensure that you carry out e-marketing in a responsible and legal way, abiding by best practice and always working on the principle of opt-in and opt-out. Despite the undoubted effectiveness of mass-mailing, some people don’t like it, won’t want to receive it and will wish to opt-out. Whatever method you use you must have an effective way to manage this process and to avoid any danger of being considered a ‘spammer’.
What are the messages that you might wish to impart to your customers? Have you launched a new product and how many of your customers would welcome that news? Do you perhaps have excess stock you want to publicise? Could you make a special offer? Is there industry news which you could tell your customers about new legislation or economic effects? Could you educate your prospective customers about the benefits of doing business with you and thereby derive more business?
Many recipients of newsletters choose to receive them just to ensure they keep up-to-date with news. But the effect of receiving the up-date means that whenever they need those goods or those services, their first ‘port of call’ is likely to be the organisation that sends them regular emails. Even if a recipient never even opens your email, even if they never read any of the content, as long as they remain opted-in and they see it arrive regularly, they will be reminded.
There are other advantages of email over paper-based marketing which are sometimes overlooked. How many of us I wonder would bother to take a printed leaflet, place it in an envelope, address and stamp it and commit it to the postal service in order to tell a friend or business colleague about a product or service they might need? Very few I suspect. But on the other hand, when the ability to forward an email is just a click away, it much more likely that a newsletter will find its way to someone else who is interested in the content. Referred business is one of the best sorts to have. Indeed you might suggest to your readers that they “tell a friend” and maybe even provide a special link so you can monitor when they do.
What you must certainly provide in any email newsletter is a link to your web site. If you have succeeded in reminding your readers that you exist, and reminding them of why they might need you, then of course you should make it as easy as possible for them to contact you. Driving traffic to a web site by e-marketing is a foolproof way to ensure that the correct site is found and that competitors don’t get between you and your marketing efforts. With a hyperlink readers are directed straight there. There is no danger of a mis-keying or of a search for you revealing competitor links which could divert business elsewhere. What is more, you can direct a hyperlink to a specific landing page and write the content of that page specifically to relate to the content of your newsletter.
Content of is of course ‘king’ and the content of your newsletter is extremely important, but that’s another long article altogether. So instead let us return to the original question: do you need an email newsletter? Maybe instead you should be asking yourself: “Can I afford not to have an email newsletter if I wish to grow my business, maintain my existing customer base and reach new markets and retain my customers’ loyalty?” |
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