Power of Newsletters

Shy No More: The Humble Newsletter Comes of Age

by copywriter and marketing coach Chris Marlow

The newsletter has always had its place in business, usually as a
benign house organ administered by the P/R department. But now the
Internet has transformed this “soft sell” standby into one of the Web’s
most prolific sales tools.

There are thousands of newsletters published on the Web, some with
millions of opt-in readers. Virtually every business type and industry
can pick from a wide array of “e-newsletters” serving their niche —
and most of them are free.

What does the electronic newsletter have that the traditional
newsletter doesn’t? What did marketers discover about free online
newsletters to cause so many to exist? And how can your company tap
into the powerful benefits of this reinvented marketing tool?

Some of the most important characteristics of the online newsletter
are listed below. A quality newsletter sent on a regular basis can help
you to:

• Retain and resell valuable customers. Most of a company’s
growth comes from its own client base. In fact, current customers are
six to 10 times more likely to respond to an offer than non-customers.
Keeping in touch via a regularly published newsletter allows you to
“massage” your most profitable database segment and generate
increased sales.

• Turn “warm” leads into “hot” prospects. Sending a periodic enewsletter
to a prospect who has “opted in” to receive your newsletter
keeps your company in front of him or her, and allows for interactions
that advance the relationship. It doesn’t cost anything more to send
your online newsletter to “cold” leads in your house database, and
“warm them up” for a subsequent marketing effort.

• Support online marketing initiatives. In each electronic
newsletter, you can create multiple opportunities to send your reader
to a specific Web page via an embedded link. Perhaps you can offer a
technical paper on some aspect of your business. Your intrigued reader
“clicks through” to a Web page in order to download your “free report.”

You then capture their contact data and ask a few questions. The right
questions will tell you if this person qualifies for follow-up as a “hot ”
lead. (This is also an excellent way to gather low-cost marketing
intelligence.)

• Enlist the power of viral marketing, if possible. The most
inexpensive and most powerful form of Web marketing is “viral
marketing.” Encourage current customers and prospects to share your
message with their colleagues. It’s inexpensive because it costs you
nothing when customers and prospects forward your newsletter to
their contacts. It’s powerful because there’s an “implied endorsement”
by the sender of the message. I used this tactic two months ago to
launch my side business of coaching for freelancers. It brought me
four clients almost instantly.

• Build a strong “opt-in” database. E-newsletters are an excellent
vehicle for collecting data. A newsletter with good, useful content (and
there should be no other kind) — can help you build an “opt-in”
database quickly, using both house files and outside lists. Because
your newsletter is 100% opt-in, you can take advantage of other Webbased
marketing methods without having to worry about stepping over
the line of acceptable email practices — which are becoming
increasingly vigilant.

• Generate revenue. Once your email list grows to a substantial size
(say 10,000 minimum for a very narrow market), you can accept
newsletter advertising, if that fits within your corporate philosophy. (In
B2B, newsletter ads are usually “text only” ads of five lines or so,
which are typically inserted at the top, in the middle, or at the end of
the newsletter.) These ads are part of the revenue model for most enewsletter
publishers, but some businesses with substantial online
databases and solid demographics taking advantage of the
opportunity.

Online newsletters are economical to create and can be distributed at
very low cost.

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