Carrying on from where we left off, let’s analyze the effectiveness and power of another popular content marketing tool (e-newsletter). Newsletters have been a favorite marketing tool for a long long time but has it’s significance diminished over the years due to the following factors:
Losing Power?
1) Overwhelming Social Media craze
Several people (especially youth like me :p) tend to resort to popular social media platforms such as Facebook or Twitter to learn more about the latest happenings around the world. Traditional consumption of news have been drastically disrupted with this social media craze and hence providing information to your prospects/consumers through e-newsletters may also have lost some of its power.
2) Spam!Â
Emails are always flooded with promotional information and hence consumers’ tolerance level for unrelated information have gone down drastically. Imagine yourself scanning through your various emails. How quickly do you look for the delete button? I bet that once you get the slightest hint that the email may not be valuable to you, you immediately head for the delete button. As such, your email newsletters need to be catchy, attractive and valuable for it to stay clear of the ‘Deleted’ zone.
Having seen 2 reasons as to why newsletters may be losing their effectiveness, let’s foucs on why they are actually still of value and why marketers should not give up on them just yet!
Nah, Still Powerful!Â
1) Relationship BuildingÂ
E-newsletters have the potential to strengthen the trust and relationship between your company and your prospects. Imagine yourself having two different kinds of friends. One who rarely talks to you while the other friend takes the effort to constantly engage you in conversations. Whose friendship would you value more? Duh, the second friend! Similarly, by constantly engaging your prospects in conversations, you build up a strong rapport with them. BUT, there is a CAVEAT: You must not become an overly attached friend constantly demanding for attention. The frequency at which you send out your newsletters is very very critical. You could vary the frequency of your newsletters according to the stage of your relationship with your prospects. If you already have an established relationship with your prospects/customers, you could slightly increase the frequency as the chances of you being viewed as spam would be lower.
2) Be known as the Guru!
E-newsletters also have the ability to establish your company’s image as an expert in a particular field. By constantly providing valuable information to your prospects and making them more knowledgable, you would definitely appear as a ‘Guru’ to them! Once again, lets revert to the analogy of a friendship. Imagine yourself in High School and you have an assignment due soon but you have so many uncleared doubts. Feeling lost, you desperately look for help. There comes your friend who patiently explains to you everything and empowers you will all the necessary knowledge to complete your assignment! What would you feel about your friend? Wouldn’t he appear as a Guru to you? Although, this may seem as a slight exaggeration, there is a similarity to how email newsletters function as that friend in need. In this case, your prospects are struggling with making the right decision on the type of product to buy as they lack a good understanding of the industry and solutions available to them. But, with your email newsletters, you empower them with the right set of information to enable to them to make good decisions. This instantly alleviates your status to a ‘Guru’ in the eyes of your prospects!
Hopefully, I have been able to convince you of the power of email newsletters, or just newsletters in general! Give it a shot and you will not regret it! However, do remember that the success of your email newsletters of course depends on the quality of content in it. So when you do send out your newsletters, be very very very careful with what kind of information you are giving out as that would definitely be the make or break factor!
