Ten reasons for moving your newsletter from print to email

The Top Ten reasons – there are plenty more, but it’s a good start:

10. Email remains extremely popular. A recent Stanford University study found that 90% of the 4,000 participants said email was their #1 activity on the internet. Ten years on, despite everything – e.g. spam, new communication channels – email remains the backbone of all digital communications.

9. Your publishing costs will be slashed and lead times shortened. Long lead times, printing, and postal costs will all dwindle when you move to email. You’ll also be able to insert important news right up to the Send. Caveat: Do not mistake email communication with your customers and prospects as “cheap” or as a reason to start sending more communications. Yes, it is cost effective, but email marketing must be handled carefully or you will hurt your company’s brand and recipient relationships. “Nurture don’t numb”. It’s not about volume, it’s about relationship building.

8. Email newsletters excel at customer retention. In this day and age anyone can find anything cheaper and faster on the internet. Often the only key to holding customers, particularly in Business to Business (B2B), is through loyalty built by reputation and customer care. Retaining customers helps your bottom line: the 2005 Harvard Business Review stated that cutting customer defections by just 5% can boost profits between 25% – 95%. Newsletters allow you to remain front of mind. Aside from offering value, such as helping them maximise their investment in your products and services, it’s also a tool for cross selling and up selling.

7. Email newsletters can be a powerful acquisition tool. But this will only work if there is a “quality vs. quantity’ attitude. Rather than finding as many new email addresses as possible, companies should spend time and budget getting qualified targeted prospects. First understand the life cycle of your products and services, and then the purchase cycle of your prospects – all of which will help you turn them into customers.

6. You’ll be able to customize the content of each newsletter. You can do this through segmentation, or through personalising elements of the newsletter. This will be based on the data that you have, some of which will be customer profiling, some Behavioral.

5. Email newsletters are a top ROI tool for your website. In a previous post I noted Jakob Nielsen’s article saying newsletters offer good Return on investment (ROI) because they “let you maintain a relationship with your customers that lasts beyond their visits to your site. …. plus, they have one more benefit: they are the primary way to liberate your site from dependence on search engines.”

4. Email newsletters are easy to pass along (or print off). Your newsletters will now have a life beyond the recipient’s inbox. Subscribers can easily forward a copy of your newsletter – while retaining their own copy – that they think might be of interest to someone else. They can also choose to make a print edition of the newsletter if they”d like.

3. You’ll be able to easily and quickly test anything in your newsletter. The world of testing is your oyster with email – you can test subject lines, offers, calls to action, time and day of send to see what works best BEFORE you do your full send.

2. Your newsletters will now be measurable. You will now have access to an array of statistical information and insight into recipient Behavior – identified opens, who clicked on what, who converted with what calls to action, among many measurements. (Email Marketing Metrics)

And the #1 reason: Email allows your newsletters to be Timely, Targeted and Relevant. These are the three key elements to your success. Email gives you the facility to send newsletters to the right recipient, at the time most convenient to them, offering content that matters to them.