Even though is pretty clear that email is one of the most powerful and effective online marketing techniques, too many times when I talk about it with clients and friends, I still keep hearing questions like: • Isn’t email old –fashioned? • Isn’t rss much more direct? • Isn’t is better to get into social media marketing? • Doesn’t blogs substitute newsletters? I understand that a lot of people are jumping into de new social media marketing bandwagon because I think it will be something huge in the near future. But, what I don’t understand is why all these people are throwing away the communication channel that is, and will be for many years, the most important in the internet, and also the online marketing technique with the biggest ROI: the email. These are the 5 reasons to start a newsletter: Newsletters create loyal users or readers Most of the readers or users of your web or blog never come back. Despite your best efforts, a big majority of your traffic arrive from search engines, another web or blog, a social networking site, consumes what they want and leave. If you don’t find a way to hook your visitors of our web or blog, most of them will never come back, not because the web or blog is bad, but because they will forget about it and wont have a way to remind themselves about your site. Offering a newsletter subscription you are giving your visitors the opportunity to sign up and be part of your list. That way yoi will be able to remember them about your web or blog inviting them to come back. The same can be said about rss feeds, but I talk about this below. Newsletters drive page views and traffic Newsletters generate a lot of traffic the day that are sent and the next day. You can use our newsletter to highlight new posts on our blog or new sections on our website. If we are launching a news product and we need a burst of traffic the newsletter can be great for this and will help with the take off of the product. 80% of your readers doesn’t know what is a rss feed Most of the tech savvy guys know what an rss feed is, but no all of them really use it. Outside, in the real world, almost no one knows about rss, in fact, just the 11% of the people knows. On the other hand, 100% of the internet users know about email, and use every day. Unless your audience is very tech savvy, the email newsletter subscription will be much more efficient. You can segment and target your audience Using a tool like Pixelnews to run your newsletter will give you access to a lot of stats and information that will help you know what your reader and users are interested in. Tracking the opens and the links will allow you to segment your readers by interest and will help you to target and personalize much more your messages. You can monetize it The newsletter opens a new way to get some profit for your website or blog. You can either use it to promote affiliate programs or you can also sell ad space in it. Advertisers are willing to pay a high CPM because newsletter readers are more loyal and will pay more attention to those ads.
I think it's a good idea to make subscribing to your newsletter easy and hassle-free. Using aweber for newsletter is pretty idiot-proof and you can set it up within hours.
jose, email is by and far the most efficient way to reach people. It is the least costly and the least time consuming method of marketing. I wouldn't discount RSS feeds and social bookmarking though, because I think they are more of a back linking for SEO strategy so that people can find your newsletters opt in page to begin with. I am ashamed to admit, but list building has been the most neglected area of my business. My goal for 2009 was to change that. Thanks for the kick in the pants. -Marcus
I disagree. With the rise of subscribers hitting the "this is spam" button, your aweber or other newsletter subscription service can be in jeopardy. If too many subscribers fraudulently mark your mailings as spam, your account will be suspended. To some extent you can minimize this by making sure you have something like "You are receiving this newsletter because you or somebody using your email address subscribe to this newsletter. If you wish to subscribe, click here. We hate spam as much as you do." But still, many mail providers have a "mark this as spam" button on the dashboard which people will automatically hit if they're receiving too much stuff from people. Deliverability is also getting to be a huge problem due to spam blockers. So not all of your messages are getting through under the best of circumstances. That said, building a list can be a good idea if you're taking time to build out a huge, authority site in a deep niche to get your "brand" out there. But in my case, I use a different business model. I specialize in selling affiliate products from smallish niche targeted sites and I offer a free report - all they have to do is download it via pdf - and within the report are affiliate links to other things I'm promoting. This works really well for me. So it really depends on your business model whether you should to an opt in newsletter or not. If you have dozens of websites across different niches, instead of constantly having to publish a newsletter for each site, often offering visitors a one time free report will give you the same mileage. Dan