Content Marketing Today

6 Reasons You Should Publish an eNewsletter

If you aren’t delivering a regular eNewsletter to build your business, you should ask yourself why. You are probably missing the biggest and best opportunity to communicate in a consistent and meaningful way with your customers.

Of course, you need to generate regular content that brings value to your customers. But, with that basic proviso, an eNewsletter should become an integral part of your content marketing arsenal. Here’s why:

An eNewsletter is one of the most effective methods of delivering content to your customers. Think of it as the logical successor to traditional direct marketing. You might think that with all the spam on the Net that email and eNewsletters are no longer effective. Not so, Adriana Iordan, Web Marketing Manager at Avangate points out, citing recent research:

1. • A 2007 McKinsey study shows that email marketing is considered the #2 most effective traffic driver after paid search.
   • 70% of B2B marketers expected to increase their email marketing budgets in 2008 per BtoBOnline.com.
2. An eNewsletter enables you and your team to connect regularly and reliably with your customers. We all know that it’s essential to stay in touch with current and future customers. But that’s pretty difficult using traditional methods of in person, in print and telephone communications– especially if you are a very small company. An effective eNewsletter serves as a regular and positive touch point between you and your customers.
3. An eNewsletter avoids the problems of interruption marketing. Because your customers and prospects have requested your eNewsletter,it doesn’t serve as the kind of irritating intrusion that junk mail, flashy ads, and unwanted phone calls present. Because they have been requested, a high percentage of your eNewsletters will be opened and read. Conversely, a much higher percentage of your unrequested direct marketing will be lost or tossed.
4. You can achieve consistent messaging with an eNewsletter much more easily than you can from a sales staff with wildly variable communications skills. You cannot control exactly what they say in the field. You can absolutely control what your eNewsletter says.
5. By providing relevant and valuable content, your eNewsletter reminds your customers that you are a trusted provider of solutions to their problems. Because your newsletter demonstrates your knowledge and understanding of the biggest challenges your customers face, they know that they can count on you to fix what’s broken.
6. eNewsletters are inexpensive to produce and deliver. Using tools like Constant Contact, you can easily and affordably manage your eNewsletter program. You may not even need to invest any money in design, if you are able to use their templates or have some basic HTML skills. Your monthly cost to deliver your eNewsletter to several thousand recipients should be only a few hundred dollars.