Email Newsletters: Friend or Foe to Your Customer's In-box?

In today’s business environment, electronic mail is becoming more and more popular. Why wouldn’t it be when you can jot down a note or two and send it out to the World Wide Web and the recipient gets it in 2 minutes, as opposed to 2 days with good old-fashioned mail? In 2004, a study found that the average consumer received approximately 308 emails a week. Most of these mails are business correspondence, but an ever increasing amount of emails coming are in the form of company newsletters. Newsletters can be used to send articles to educate the consumer, or to pass along important information on sales or deals the business is holding. Almost every company now offers a newsletter, and these newsletters can be sent daily, weekly, or monthly.

With the ease of disseminating information to your customers, email newsletters also have a downside; they completely clog email in-boxes. I have to admit I’m a newsletter junkie, and on an average day I receive over 150 newsletters.

Which ones have been successful in passing the “keep it or trash it” test; newsletters that provide information and don’t bash me over the head with selling.

Your clients are not naïve; they know you are trying to sell to them. They also have a certain degree of tolerance when it comes to selling. But, if you want to keep subscribers to your newsletter, you must give them a reason to want to open your emails. The frequency of your mailings determines the balance of selling to information you should include in your emails. If you’re mailing monthly notices to your clients on the specials that you are running, then your subscribers will be interested and keep up their subscription. If you’re sending weekly and even daily emails on sales, while offering little else, you’ll lose subscribers.

The most successful newsletter tactic is to send daily or weekly emails to your subscribers with content and advertisements for your business. Content can be anything from articles you’ve found on the internet or written yourself, tips and hints pertaining to your industry, local events (if you’re marketing locally), this day in history, anything that you think your customers will find interesting and that will impart some sort of knowledge on them.

The next time to you start to send a newsletter out to your customers and subscribers, take a few moments to go over it and ask yourself: If I was getting this from a company, would I be happy or frustrated to receive this piece of mail.