The challenge and how to meet it

By Mark Brownlow | Post to del.icio.us

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Much has been written about the potential benefits of email publishing. With every company expected to have a website, now every website (and every company) is expected to have an email newsletter. But the stumbling block for many marketers and entrepreneurs, busy at their virtual printing presses, is the word "potential".

The benefits of email publishing don't arise by default. They are earned. There are successful newsletters, which produce the desired benefits, and there are unsuccessful ones, which don't. But what makes a newsletter "successful"?

To make the most of any of the potential benefits (see box), a newsletter must have long-term influence and impact. Influence and impact on a subscriber's behavior and awareness.

Email newsletters can...

  • provide direct revenue, through offers for your own products and services, subscriptions, advertising sales, and affiliate referral fees.

  • provide indirect revenue, by building customer and partner relationships, contributing to branding efforts, increasing awareness, improving customer service and adding value to a purchase or registration.

  • complement website promotion, by encouraging subscribers to go (back to) a website.

Bryan Eisenberg of Future Now, Inc. talks of an email newsletter's Impact Quotient. He describes this as the newsletter's "ability to persuade people to save it, talk about it, refer to it and forward it to their sphere of influence".

Done well, your email newsletter converts subscribers into enthusiasts, into people who look forward to, open, read and save your mails. These enthusiasts provide you with feedback and pass your content on to friends and colleagues. They trust what you write, and respond to your advice, your offers, your recommendations or your advertisements.

It should be clear already that we're talking about something completely different from email promotions. It's important to distinguish between this concept of email newsletters and what we might call exclusively action-oriented email, such as the regular mailing of discount offers or catalogs to an opt-in list.

Exclusively action-oriented emails are designed to provoke an immediate response. Their influence is short-term; if the recipient doesn't take the required action more or less immediately, the potential benefits of such email are lost.

Email newsletters may also contain action-related elements, such as news of a special offer. But their greatest potential lies in their long-term value; in their ability to build, over time, a lasting relationship with subscribers.

The big question, of course, is how to create a newsletter that brings about this conversion from subscriber to enthusiast. How do you build that relationship using email, and generate that long-term influence and impact? That's what this report is all about.

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