News

Newsletters have a key role to play in making email marketing campaigns more effective, a number of commentators have argued this week.

Old-style email marketing consisted of sending out as many messages as possible to any and every email address you could get your hands on.

Most of those would be ignored or binned by spam filters, but a small minority would be read and an even smaller proportion would convert – and often that would be enough for a spammer sending out millions of emails.

Today, a much more sophisticated – and less irritating – form of “permission marketing” is gaining ground, whereby visitors to your website are encouraged to sign up for updates by you giving them something in return.

Many online businesses provide discounts or special offers, but one of the most popular methods is the newsletter. By giving valuable news information to your customers along with commercial messages, you are far more likely to generate engagement.

Writing in the Belfast Telegraph, Barry Adams declared that newsletters are “one of the reasons why email marketing is still around after all this time.”

At SiteProNews meanwhile, Graham Bayliss argued: “There are numerous ways to promote your products and services online and one of the most powerful is the email and the newsletter.”

It is, of course, important to make sure that the news and the commercial messages cohere with one another, and to ensure that readers are getting something that is of interest and of value to them. Remember – a poorly cobbled-together newsletter can be just as bad as the worst kind of spam.