Do you use an email newsletter to reach customers, prospects, blog readers or employees? If so, you know that e-newsletters are far from dinosaurs, and an online search for comment shows they are alive and well. Here’s some praise for e-newsletters:
“Email newsletters are the single MOST powerful marketing tool on Earth for a professional service provider.”
– Michael J. Katz
“What’s one of the most effective marketing tools for building your brand, engaging with customers, and closing sales? An email newsletter.”
– FulcrumTech
“[A crisis is] a time to be helpful and sincere. It’s a time to build relationships, nurture customers, and create long-term loyalty. There’s no better way to do that than with the slow, steady cadence of an email newsletter.” – Ann Handley
“Even though email is the oldest Internet media format, it remains extremely effective at keeping in touch with loyal customers.” – Jakob Nielsen
“Social media provides such a torrent of information that it can be futile to try to keep up with everything, and with the demise of RSS feeds, email newsletters have emerged as a way to receive updates from your favorite content creators in a handy, easily digestible format.” – Rebecca Sentance
Email newsletters remain “the best, cheapest and easiest way to retain interested readers.” – John Turner
“Email is far and above the most valuable audience channel.” – Brian Clark
“Mobile use…makes email newsletters today an even more important way to stay connected with customers than they were in the past. This is particularly true because people sometimes have time to kill while using their phones.” – Jakob Nielsen
“…we have always been the go-to source for friends seeking the scoop on current events or breaking news. We soon realized three things: Reading the news is time consuming; Wanting to read the news is a hobby; lastly, not everyone has the time or interest.” – theSkimm e-newsletter
“I typically tell my clients to do their best to ‘own’ the relationship with their target audience by building their email database and sending out an e-newsletter.” – Leslie Hughes
“You can run around hoping to find people who are ready to buy today, or you can publish a newsletter and let them find you.” – Michael J. Katz
“The most important reason to publish an email newsletter might be this: It’s one of the few remaining ways to reach your customers without the tolls, fees, and restrictive rules imposed by the gatekeepers – search engines, social media sites, application stores, and the like. The newsletter goes right into each individual user’s inbox.” – Jakob Nielsen
Do you agree? Disagree? Let’s hear it.
Updated July 2020.
YES! I am a fan of newsletters and often recommend their use to my clients and students.
I thought you might be! 🙂 Thanks for taking the time to comment.
In your experience, how much content is too much content in a newsletter?
Good question. A lot depends on the sender, the reader and how useful the content is to both. “TLDNR” (too long, did not read) is a factor. Does your reader open the email and it scrolls on and on, so they think the investment of time reading it is too great vs. how valuable the content is? If there are a lot of links, will the reader set it aside to read later, which may or may not happen?
In general, I’d say that shorter is better: one main thought/theme/article, with links to other useful, supporting items. Some people advise using only short snippets in an e-newsletter, with a link to the full article elsewhere. I’m not a big fan of this myself, and it doesn’t work if you don’t have a website that can host the full articles, as is the case with an e-newsletter I edit for an industry association. So we try to have just one or two lengthier articles along with short pieces. In this case, the reader is a member of the association and presumably gets more value from the content and would be more forgiving than, say, a reader of a marketing newsletter.