Newsletters are a time-honored business-to-customer information medium that supports the overall marketing communications effort. But what was once a rather common form of information dissemination has, for many agencies, fallen by the wayside.
And who can blame them? Newsletters take time and effort and cost money to produce, print, and mail. Other agency activities are more important and relevant compared to what many regard as a non-productive chore. Even if you buy a "canned" newsletter from a third-party source, there's still some expense and effort involved.
But Web-based newsletters can breath new life into the communication process. True, someone still needs to write and produce it, which often requires coordination with other busy people, but many of the production and distribution costs can be significantly reduced or almost eliminated.
The three most common ways to handle a Web-based newsletter are to 1) post it to your Web site,
2) send the newsletter via e-mail, or 3) use a combination approach. Let's look at what's involved and a few of the pros and cons.
Site-based newsletters
A site-based newsletter simply resides passively on your Web site. Information is disseminated the moment someone comes to your Web site to read it. The newsletter could exist as an HTML that's part of your site or as a PDF document that can be downloaded, or both. You can generate the newsletter yourself or purchase it from a third-party service. Apart from writing and formatting the newsletter, this method is probably the simplest from a handling and distribution point of view. The big drawback to this approach, however, is that it is passive and relies on people coming to your site. Thus, unless you tell people about your online newsletter, the likelihood they will find it on their own will be small.
E-mail newsletters
The biggest benefit of an e-mail newsletter is that it is sent directly to the person you want to read it. Because it ends up in their e-mail, instead of mixed in with the shuffle of paper-based mail, an e-mail newsletter is direct one-to-one communication. Other than writing and formatting the newsletter, there is still the work of collecting e-mail addresses — which you should be doing anyway — and the work of assembling a mass e-mail, a possibly daunting and technically tricky task and/or something that is often prohibited by service providers. Like bulk mail services, mass e-mail is usually best left to service providers that are specially-equipped to handle it. With this method, you can write the newsletter yourself or even purchase low-cost pre-written newsletters for as little as 10¢ per customer — including the mass e-mailing!
Combined approach
This method is increasing in popularity because it also builds traffic to your Web site. You put your newsletter on the Web site, but also send an e-mail that "teases" the recipient to visit your Web site to read it. The e-mail might list a few noteworthy items, and then add, "For more information, click here," which is a link to your Web site. Visitors not only come to your site to read the newsletter, but also might browse your site for other — hopefully inviting and useful — information while they are there.
Benefit and involvement
Newsletters are non-threatening forms of communication. To be effective, though, they must be regular and consistent. Many traditional paper-based newsletter efforts failed because of waning enthusiasm, tedium, and expense of keeping the newsletter effort going. That can also happen to an online newsletter effort.
The cheapest and easiest way to stay in touch with customers via a newsletter is to purchase a service in which the only thing you need to do is to provide the e-mail addresses. Of course, if you prefer to do all the work yourself, that's OK, but realize that you will have to sustain an ongoing effort.
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