Myth: E-Newsletters are easy to create and send
I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but e-newsletters are really quite polarizing in the world of marketing, online and off. On the one pole you have people who role their eyes and make vomit sounds when you mention e-newsletters. You might hear something like, “OMG I get like, 27 gazillion a day. The whole reason I went to the Inbox Zero conference is because I need to figure out how to get RID of the e-newsletters!” On the other pole you don’t have as much talking. It’s really more about action. These are the folks who send all of those e-newsletters. Though I cannot prove it, I would bet there is even some overlap between these two disparate groups of people.
So what is going on here? Why are we getting so many e-newsletters, all of which drive us nuts, all while we keep sending our own? I have a theory. I think that just like we see in the world of social media, the thought is that creating an e-newsletter and sending it is so cheap and so easy that there’s no earthly reason why NOT to do it. As a result, people tend to jump into the process without really thinking about it first.
I’m going to give you a little quiz at this time. Now, whether or not you tell me the results, hopefully it will get those little brain hamsters rolling a bit. Ready?
1. Have you added people to your recipients list without their knowledge or permission?
2. Do you make efforts to indicate to your recipients that you want them to talk back?
3. Do you use your e-newsletters to sell, inform, or both?
4. Do you send your e-newsletters on a regular schedule?
5. Do you have a content plan for your e-newsletters?
Now, let’s talk about each of these five things in a bit more detail.
Who is receiving your e-newsletters?
One of the reasons that e-newsletters are perceived of as being really easy is that it IS really easy to add a person to an email database, especially now that platforms like Constant Contact and MailChimp exist. You literally just type peoples’ contact information in. Pretty darned easy. There’s an important step that I fear a lot of people miss, however, and that is making sure that people opt in to your e-newsletter. In fact, best practices indicate that people should opt in twice, once to sign up for your e-newsletter and then again via an invitate to unsubscribe if they wish.
I receive at least one e-newsletter from a person whom I know. We’ve had online conversations only, never phone or skype or anything like that. I’ve never met them in person. I’ve visited their blog a few times. And yet I receive their e-newsletter. Now how did that happen? When I converse with you, am I opting in to your e-newsletter? I don’t think so.
Always remember that the people who receive your e-newsletter will feel just like you do when you receive an e-newsletter you didn’t ask for. It may make them think less of you. They may unsubscribe. They may wonder what other sneaky things you do to try to grow your business. Going through the business cards you gather at a trade show and inputting all of those e-mail addresses is NOT the way to build your e-newsletter list. Stray away from this practice.
Are you inviting your readers to talk back?
Just like anything that is done in the marketing world today, it’s important to remember that your readers are the same people who have adjusted to the realities of Web 2.0 (or are we at 3.0 now?). They want to be able to talk back to you. They want to feel like you WANT them to talk back to you. Are your e-newsletters leaving some breathing room for participation? Do you actually invite your readers to respond or reply?
Say what?
What are you using your e-newsletters for in the grand scheme of your marketing campaign? Are you using them to sell your products or services? Are they loud and filled with images? There are ways to reach out to existing and potential customers with your e-newsletters, but nobody is going to be happy to receive a yelling salesman in his or her inbox, right? Besides, spam filters are getting pretty clever (except for all of the actual spam email, which seems to always get through). Images with blatant sales messages in the headline and lots of images may not even reach your readers.
Truthfully, your e-newsletter is a chance to help you nurture relationships with existing and potential clients. Yelling and screaming, doing nothing but selling, or creating extremely aggressive messaging is a great way to make people run away. Hard to nurture relationships that way, don’t you think?
Now for your regularly scheduled programming
Like a blog site, e-newsletters can be used to build a sense of expectation. If you send daily, try to send around the same time every day. If you send weekly, try to send on the same day. And so on. Scheduling your e-newsletters not only helps your recipients know when to expect your content, it also helps you track traffic to your website more reliably to when your e-newsletter went out. If your traffic keeps spiking at the same time you send out your e-newsletter, it’s a lot easier to make that connection.
A Man, A Plan, An E-newsletter…
Ok, that’s not exactly a palindrome, but having a plan for your e-newsletter content can be a great help in integrating your content into the rest of your marketing campaign. For example, if you are going to be exhibiting at a trade show, talking about that in your e-newsletter can be useful. While the plan does not need to be rigid or highly detailed, having some idea of what you will talk about can help prevent things like last-minute ideas and repetition.
These five aspects of e-newsletter planning and sending represent only the tip of the iceberg, and we’ve just touched on each one a bit. Now, is it possible to send an e-newsletter without all of these considerations? Sure. But what are you risking? Being black-listed as a spammer. Losing your reputation as an up-and-up business person. Losing relationships with existing or potential customers. That seems like a lot to risk just because of the myth that e-newsletters are easy to create and send.
Don’t you think?
1st image credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/xiaming/50391986/ via Creative Commons
2nd image credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/tambako/3593686294/ via Creative Commons
18 Comments
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Hi Margie – I think there is no room for debate on your points here and I agree. Email is golden and too many people abuse it. I think there is also a struggle on this one when a blog tied into a business. If your email is going to other bloggers, who want to be notified when you post, you are fine with daily emails. My fear is those who aren’t interested in active participation and don’t want that many notifications and may be caught off guard after the sign up. I think providing options is a good thing to consider, but it does involve an extra step. I’m stewing about that now. Curious what you think. Sue
@suegrimm Hi Sue. I don’t really consider an email subscription the same thing as an e-newsletter. I could be wrong about this, but I feel that if you sign up to get blog posts, you’re sort of willingly putting your inbox at the mercy of the bloggers. By the same token, as a blogger, if you know that people have signed up to receive your blog posts, you should try to keep a regular schedule and should probably try not to send 16 posts a day (although hey, it’s your blog and you’ll post if you want to).
I think of e-newsletters as separate content. They could incorporate some blog posts but they are really different in terms of what they are trying to do.
Does that make sense?
Thank you, Margie. You continue to teach me so much about social media! I am in my infancy as I build my “brand” (student-professor communication) since I will never really be a business, per se, but yet I want to attract more students talking about their academic issues. Someone who is trying to do the same just started to do e-newsletters (I’m nowhere near close to even thinking about this. I still have to figure out how to defect Blogger and get to WordPress for goodness sakes!) and we are both learning about this medium. I just forwarded her your piece so we can learn from all sides. We academics are in receiver mode… taking it all in :-). Thank you, as always! Ellen @chattyprof
@chattyprof Glad I could help, Ellen. I have a video tutorial up there that goes through how I migrated from Blogger to WordPress, by the way. Maybe that could help you along. Let me know! 🙂
@margieclayman I really appreciate that! I am going to check that out. I definitely need to figure that one out pretty quickly… I hear that it’s an important migration as I move forward :-). Ellen
I think that there is a right way and a wrong way to approach this. But I question why are you approaching it at all? I wrote a post that asks ‘do you really need a customer newsletter’? http://thecontentcocktail.com/2012/01/23/do-you-really-need-a-customer-newsletter/ I myself, have a leg in both camps on this one because I received newsletters that are really valuable and some that are not so much and I wonder how I got on the list. Then, I am torn on whether or not my company should have one because I really dont think you should just for the sake of doing it. Do you have something important to share/send? And, can you answer that on a regular basis such as monthly?
@C_Pappas E-newsletters, like any marketing tactic, will not be effective if you’re doing it just to do it. People will sense that you don’t really have a plan. Your inability to pin down what you want to achieve will also mean that your plans and your content will shift and ebb and flow and be all over the place.
E-newsletters can be valuable tools if used correctly if only because they can keep your company front of mind, but it’s a question of how you are thought of if you are front of mind. Are you that annoying company that sends 17 e-newsletters a week or are you that company that sometimes sends out pretty useful, actionable content?
It’s all about strategy 🙂
Margie, I would like to add one very good reason why some people rail against newsletters yet send newsletters.
We are not our own audience.
This is what I mean: marketers (publishers) need to meet their audiences. As the publisher here at MargieClayman.com, you may despise newsletters, but you have that little signup box in the top right corner still. You do it because you know that some of us will prefer newsletters, others will prefer RSS feeds (personally, I’m of the RSS variety), and maybe a few will prefer to subscribe to your FB page. As a publisher, you don’t impose your own preferences on your audience.
Now, I don’t mean to support adding people manually to your newsletter, that is a completely different topic of conversation. But why do we rail on newsletters yet still send them? There is a very good reason…
@Wittlake Hi Eric,
As I mentioned to Sue below, in this context I am viewing an e-newsletter as separate from blog content. To me, receiving a blog post via e-mail subscription is just that – a subscription. I define an e-newsletter as being primarily different content, maybe more company oriented, perhaps less personal in some cases, but also, perhaps, aimed at the same audience.
You do hit on something really important though, and that is that you are differentiating between how a “publisher” feels about an e-newsletter versus the desire to reach the audience. I think it is a misstep to separate one from the other. You need to put on your reader’s shoes and think, “OK, if that’s me, how am I reacting to this content?” if you can’t sympathize/empathize with your existing and potential customers, you’re going to run into even more complex problems down the line, right?
@margieclayman @Wittlake I like your blog for many reasons but this is a big one. You built a blog separate from your biz, however you are a marketer who can see both sides and use this place to discuss a variety of things. I agree with you, but I just am not sure it’s different in the minds of the average person when they sign-up for a blog and I am on a mission to figure out my own identity crisis. LOL. I agree, it’s all about the audience in the end and you need to respect them when you send out an e-newsletter. I got involved with a bunch of small business owners a few years back and they added me to their lists and started pounding me with salesy messages. Not such a good idea in my opinion even though I could opt-out. And when I get frustrated, I do opt-out but I feel bad about it because I met them personally.. And yes, in those cases, they have nothing to do with blogging.
@margieclayman If you are of that rare breed of publisher than never drinks your own Kool-Aid, it may be possible, but the rest need to maintain some degree of separation or they will be blinded by their own bias.
I know you have been in media buying in the past (it’s a big piece of my day job), and I’m sure you have heard publishers that say things like “our CXO audience starts their day with our content” or “if we don’t publish it, CXO’s don’t believe it”. When publishers have attitudes like this, they are not longer capable of really wearing their audience’s shoes.
@Wittlake Fair. What I meant I guess is that you need to consider what turns you off. If receiving e-newsletters from people you just tweeted with turns you off, it’s likely that doing so will also turn off your readers. Golden Rule sort of thing 🙂
@Wittlake I’m with you – when I’m speaking with clients about all kinds of marketing tools, I’m always saying “You are not the target.” And of course as the Cluetrain Manifesto told us 10+ years ago, you have to let your audience choose the way in which they interact with you, not try to impose specific a specific medium/method.
(That said, I do tend to think that e-newsletters have had their day – good social media and an RSS button are more than sufficient to reach the people who actually want to engage with your content.)
@SarahWelstead @Wittlake The key there is “your content.” I think it needs to be reworded in this case to be, “content that will be of interest to them” or “content that will help them.” Sometimes, for some businesses, an e-newsletter where people can respond individually and privately may be easier to grasp than a blog site where they may have to sign up for a commenting system, then have their comment reviewed as much as the blog post is. I think there can still be value in the e-newsletter but there’s a big but. It of course needs to be done well.
Dear Margie –
I have had a massive guilt problem that I never gathered names for a newsletter.
Unless I am a big fan of the sender, they are all deleted on site. Like 50 a week. Maybe more.
I just had this feeling that it would be bothering people. Enough is enough.
@miraclady Well, that’s why it’s important to make sure people opt-in. If they request content, your guilt is erased. If you send content without permission you SHOULD feel guilty 🙂
Margie,
Awesome article. I’ve gone down this path before for work with pretty good success. What I realized was that a well done enewsletter is very much like a blog. What ended up being the key to success was that my audience was much more in tune with email than reading blogs. In many ways, blogs and enewsletters are much the same and your tips apply well to both mediums.
@jwsokol
@jwsokol That’s an interesting point. To me, blogs are more about pull (are people visiting your site and engaging with your content?) while e-newsletters are more push. Even though people are opting in (hopefully) you are still pushing your content to them. Each has their value but they remain pretty differentiated in my brain.