Email Newsletters and Blogs – How to Communicate with Customers

February 27, 2009 by Rita Marshall 

Email newsletters and blogs are two great ways to communicate with customers and potential customers. Being electronic forms of communication, there’s all the advantages of marketing your business with none of the cost of producing and mailing out a paper product. (It’s also much friendlier on the environment). There are still advantages and disadvantages to each method, however.

Email Newsletters

An email newsletter or “e-newsletter” is a collection of articles and news about your business or industry emailed to subscribers on a regular basis. A business will have to set up the logistics to maintain a database of subscribers, as well as handle the creation and delivery of the newsletter. (This can be done through a variety of e-publisher software). They will also need to create content for the newsletter.

Benefits of an email newsletter:

- A regular reminder of your business’ products and services, an email newsletter also lets you tell customers about any promotions or upcoming events.

- It doesn’t require a lot of time invested. An email newsletter comes out on a regular schedule, and while some eager beavers send one out every two weeks, sending one out every quarter is also acceptable.

- Collecting a database of email addresses if you want to send out extra notices about upcoming promotions or events. Make sure you have obtained permission from subscribers to do this.

Drawbacks of an email newsletter:

- It can be hard to strike a balance between appearing too rarely or too frequently in your customer’s inbox. I’ve received e-newsletters that I barely remember signing up for, and I’ve also unsubscribed from newsletters that bombarded me with too many updates, offers and special promotions.

- Finding and possibly paying for an e-publisher for your email newsletter. There are free options out there, like EZezine, but as with most free online software, features are limited. In the case of EZezine, the free version does not allow you to save drafts. Everything must be created and sent out at once.

- Creating regular content. If you have ideas but no time to be a writer, you can hire a copywriter to create focused, interest-grabbing articles. If you don’t even have ideas, a good copywriter will research your industry and suggest some before writing for you.

A Business Blog

Blogs are extremely popular right now for both personal and business use. With a blog, a business can provide constant news, ideas and updates on a web page that is available to the general public. If your business already has a website, adding a blog should not be difficult.

Benefits of a business blog:

- It’s available to the general public, reaching both customers and potential customers who might be interested in your business, but not enough to sign up for an email newsletter just yet.

- It allows your business more interaction with customers, potential customers, and other businesses. There are a number of ways to do this, whether by allowing comments, guest posts or responding to other blogs.

- It’s a great tool for building web presence. It’s not enough just to have a static website anymore – the businesses that are thriving are those that are using different web media to improve their services and attract more customers.

Drawbacks of a business blog:

- Customers and potential customers need to find your blog, and then they need to keep coming back. Getting people to bookmark and then follow your blog is difficult. This can be remedied by burning an RSS feed for your blog.

- It requires more time than an email newsletter. While blog posts can be shorter, you need to add to your blog more frequently (say, every few days or every week) as opposed to a monthly or quarterly newsletter.

- The need for regular content. Again, a copywriter can help here, from the idea stage to the posting stage.

The two methods are easily combined, if you have the resources. In my case, the articles from the On Target monthly newsletter would appear over the course of the same month as weekly posts to the On Target blog. The end of each blog post would include a subscribers’ link for anyone who was interested in signing up for the email newsletter.

Then I dropped the newsletter. Why would I do that? Find out next time in Email Newsletter vs. Blog – Which Is Right for Your Business?