Why should YOU publish an email newsletter? eZines are one of the most popular and effective tools that we can use to communicate with our prospects and customers. You know a lot about your industry AND your business that your audience will find interesting.

Through our Weekly eZine Source and blog series, we’ll cover every aspect of formulating your e-newsletter, from design to content to marketing. We’ll help you to transform your subscribers into an enthusiastic audience who will look forward to each issue and gladly share it with their friends and associates.

SO! Let’s take a look at Strategy #24!

This week, we’re going to compare online and print newsletters, and I promise that there’s going to be a strategy in there somewhere!

Naturally, I’m quite the proponent of online newsletters and ezines and email marketing. However, I must concede that print newsletters really are more effective when it comes to response rates. Print media marketing is also the best avenue for some types of businesses, particularly medical professionals, accountants, financial and insurance advisors, and a quite a few more. It all depends on what works with their audience and what their readers have come to expect.

Overall, though, there are many more benefits to online newsletters than just the open and response rates and they DO affect the overall success of every newsletter campaign. Let’s look at FOUR of those, and then we’ll put it all together and summarize what we’ve learned.

Of course, e-newsletter are vastly more COST-EFFECTIVE than their printed counterparts. Sure, you may spend money on your marketing service provider, you spend time (and time IS $$, right?) putting together your content and your formatting, and you MIGHT even shell out a few bucks to have someone do all that work for you BUT, it’s not even close to the cost of one print campaign! If you’re working on a shoestring budget, or you just don’t want to go to a larger expense than you need to, online marketing is the way to go!

If you’re had issues with your marketing service, you may not agree with this one, but once you’re really up and running and know what you’re doing, there really are relatively FEW HEADACHES involved with getting your message out electronically. You can work from home, in the middle of the night, wearing your bunny slippers (or whatever). There’s also almost always some resource or someone to help you to get it right, if you look in the right places. NO worries about how much ink’s in the printer, or if the printer got your proof right, or if it’s ready on time, or dealing with the post office.

Here’s the thing about e-newsletters. If you’re doing things above board, you’re ideally reaching out with your stuff to people who are (potentially) more willing to receive it than everyone who opens their mailbox (we’re talking direct mail marketing, not dedicated marketing just to your customers or clients or patients or who ever). You can TARGET A SPECIFIC GROUP of people just by virtually hanging out where they do. And again, it’s all virtually headache-free.

Plus, you can essentially reach a thousand people or more for the same cost of reaching ten people. As we say in insurance, it’s all about the Law of Large Numbers…the more people the better. You just can’t send a thousand letters with ten stamps, right? Granted, response rates tend to be better with direct mail; however, email marketing gives you the opportunity to REACH EXPONENTIALLY MORE PEOPLE and attract more prospects.

Here is my humble little example of how this cost-effectiveness really works.

It’s a lot of numbers, I know, but the gist of it is this: direct mail is always more effective and may or may not continue to be that way. Response rates to printed campaigns will probably always be better, but check out the numbers. It all comes down to the cost. You’re only getting one third of the responses (or sales) electronically BUT it cost you about 8% of what a print campaign would cost you…so…BOTTOM line, more profits, even with a much lower response rate.

One final note on the number of campaigns per year…you don’t have to do just 8 per year. If you do more, and you CAN if the cost is minimal, you can make up the difference pretty quickly.

AND, imagine that, for the same cost of a direct mail campaign to 20,000 people, you could have potentially reached 250,000 via email for the same cost per message and earned 12 times the profits!
Used wisely, your database of prospected email addresses can be a very valuable commodity, compared to a simple list of names and mailing addresses!