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Distributing your marketing newsletter by electronic mail can produce huge benefits in time and money—and generate valuable
information about your customers’ likes and dislikes.
E-mail is fast replacing other modes of business communication. You can do the same things with e-mail as you can with
print, and you can do them better.
An e-mail newsletter offers four main benefits compared to a printed newsletter:
Four main benefits
- Lower cost. Because they require no printing or postage, e-mail newsletters cost up to 90% less to produce and
distribute.
- Interactivity. An e-mail in HTML format gives readers a better, more interactive viewing experience, including
links to related Web sites. Studies show that many people prefer HTML e-mails over faxes and printed newsletters.
- Shorter cycle time. E-mail newsletters eliminate the printing and mailing steps, which add significantly to
production time. And distribution is faster.
Unlike a printed newsletter, which can take several days to be printed and delivered via the mail, all of your e-mail newsletters can be delivered within a few
hours of when they are created. Feedback also comes quicker: Senders of e-mail newsletters often receive responses on the same day their publication is broadcast. The short turnaround allows you to test
alternative newsletter versions in the morning, evaluate the results in the afternoon, and roll out a final version the next day.
- Everything is measurable. E-mail service providers can calculate a myriad of statistics, including total number
of e-mails sent and opened, e-mails read, and click-through rates that tell you which articles had the highest readership. In some cases e-mail services can tell you which individual clients opened your
electronic notice and which clients clicked through to specific stories. This intelligence helps build a custom profile that can be a valuable lead generation tool. You will know exactly which service interests
which client, enabling you to make more effective follow-up calls.
Distribution options
Once you make the decision to publish electronically, you have several distribution options. You can send an e-mail
newsletter in a number of formats:
- Plain text messages are the simplest and least expensive to produce, but also the least visually appealing.
Plain text messages are less inviting, since they have no color, graphics, photos or design features. On the other hand, text-only newsletters are inexpensive to produce and can be read by virtually everyone.
- HTML messages include
graphics, colored logos and photos. They are visually attractive and industry research indicates that 80% of all e-mail users today can read HTML messages. The cost to program HTML code and format for
distribution usually is comparable to the design costs of a printed piece.
- Attachments can take many forms, including a Microsoft Word document, a PDF (portable document file) or a file
made by any number of other software applications.
PDFs are the most common attachment. These are essentially electronic photocopies of a document readable using a common utility, Adobe Acrobat Reader.
Unfortunately, attachments are often screened out by network firewalls. In addition, some recipients may be hesitant to open an unfamiliar document for fear of viruses. And others may not want to take the
additional time and effort required to open an attachment.
- An e-mail notice tells a recipient that the current newsletter issue is now available for viewing and includes a
“click here to view” link to a Web page. A broadcast notice typically includes brief article descriptions and links that readers can click on to immediately view each individual story.
Return on investment
The biggest advantage to electronic newsletters is that they can yield a much higher return on investment compared to a
paper publication. Dramatically lower development costs combined with a large increase in reader response adds up to an enormous increase in the return on your marketing dollars.
This is not to say that printed newsletters are dead. Some people prefer paper simply because they don't like dealing with
computers. Meanwhile, others like the familiarity of a paper newsletter and the ability to make notes on a paper publication and pass it along to a colleague.
Of course, e-mailed newsletters, particularly those that come in the form of a PDF attachment, can be printed out to provide
the benefits associated with paper. In other words, with e-mail newsletters, you can deliver publications less expensively but still provide readers with portability.
Indeed, the unique advantages of paper newsletters are dwindling. <
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