5 Reasons You Need an E-Newsletter

There are a lot of reasons why an e-newsletter is a great marketing tool. First and foremost, your business must have an electronic presence. E-marketing is another marketing channel that absolutely and positively must be a part of your marketing plan. There are many platforms of e-marketing including websites, social networking, referral links or programs, affiliate programs, e-mails and of course e-newsletters. All of these platforms can and should be part of your plan and deserve the requisite attention to understand how and why they can be so powerful. However, today I intend to detail e-newsletters. We’ll save the other e-platforms for another time.

To understand what I mean by “e-newsletter” let’s address what is NOT an e-newsletter. An e-newsletter is not a one-time e-mail blast. It is not a sales pitch. And most importantly, it is not spam. When I refer to e-newsletter I mean something with valuable content that is distributed via a professional service, like Aweber (http://boost.aweber.com). You can certainly do an e-newsletter on your own, but a professional service provides templates, anti-spamming functionality, tracking and monitoring that you might not normally get if you do it on your own. So with this understanding of an e-newsletter, here are five reasons you need an e-newsletter:

1) COST: e-newsletters, at most, cost about $20/month. This number can vary depending on the service and depending on the number of e-mails in your database. However, most services do not limit the number of blasts that you can make. A lot of businesses will send out e-newsletters once a week (like mine). If you start doing the math, $20/month for 4 e-newsletters for hundreds of people each blast makes the cost-per-contact extremely reasonable.

2) INCREASE YOUR TOUCHPOINTS: marketing is more about repetition than anything else. E-newsletters give you another marketing touchpoint to remain top-of-mind for your database. Assuming you can provide valuable content with each blast, your database will open the e-mails and understand that you offer a great product or service. Your name and brand will remain fresh and “sticky” (as in the brand or name will “stick” with the recipients). This way, when the recipient is ready to buy, they will think of you. Similarly, recipients will also know your name and brand to refer to others.

3) EASY REFERRALS: picking up from point #2, e-newsletters make referrals very easy. How difficult is it to forward an e-newsletter to someone else? Think of it this way: let’s imagine one of your contacts comes across a friend that could use your service. They say to their friend, “let me find his or her business card, I know I have it somewhere.” Chances are, the business card is lost or hard to find or perhaps it takes a while to get the information gathered. However, with an e-newsletter, the referral is very easy. That same contact can say “let me forward you his or her e-newsletter.” Not only is the information transferred very easily, the new contact can view the value you provide. This is much more powerful than a business card exchange.

4) LEVERAGE OTHER E-MARKETING: with an e-newsletter, you can add links to your website, blog, partner websites, affiliates and anything else available on the web. Recipients that open your e-newsletter can easily link to the products or services that you recommend. This becomes vastly beneficial if you are an affiliate of another program. You can add a link to the other program that your recipients will be sure to see and most likely click through if there is value.

5) TRACKING: assuming you use a professional service for your e-newsletter like Aweber, you can track and measure your campaigns. You can see the open rate (percentage of recipients that open your email), click rate (percentage of recipients that open and click through to a link on your e-newsletter) and unsubscribe rates (percentage of people who request to unsubscribe). You can even set up tests. For example, let’s say you want to test a marketing message. Send 50% of your database your e-newsletter with one marketing message in the subject line and send the other 50% that same e-newsletter with a different marketing message in the subject line. See which e-newsletter had a greater open rate and you’ll understand which marketing message is more powerful.

This is just the tip of the iceberg for e-marketing. If you don’t have an e-newsletter yet, consider the reasons above and check out Aweber (http://boost.aweber.com) or another provider. You’ll see there is tremendous benefit to an e-newsletter for little cost.