E-Newsletters: Hit ’em where they are
Looking for a smart start to your new year? On January 12, I’ll be holding a new morning-long session on “How to Create an E-Newsletter,” in partnership with ProfitLearn PEI and the Queen Street Commons. You can register for the session on-line at the Queen Street Commons site.
Early baseball legend Willie Keeler had this advice for aspiring baseball hitters: “Keep your eye clear, and hit ’em where they ain’t.” If you replace “where they ain’t” with “where they are,” it’s good advice for on-line communication. You need to have clear-eyed content, and to hit it where they are, on a daily basis.
E-Newsletters are still one of the most effective ways of pulling together your on-line message in one place, for an interested audience. The main reason? Because e-mail is where people are.
Many small businesses and groups have been placing most of their on-line focus on social media. There’s a lot of interesting new ways to connect with Facebook and Twitter, for sure. But when you’re developing an on-line strategy, and looking at social media and more time-tested media like e-newletters, it’s not an either-or proposition.
E-Newsletters find people when they start their day– in their e-mail inbox. A subscriber may only look at your content for 30 seconds, but that time window gives you a chance to relate what’s new and interesting in your world. It might be a Facebook campaign, a new blog post, or an on-line promotion. The e-newsletter provides you a way to integrate all these links in one place, and put them right where they can be noticed.
It’s an ideal way to reward loyal members of the audience with special information, or unique promotions. I have clients that use e-newsletters to circulate high quality pictures and postcards, and others that use special e-newsletter promotion codes to give discounts to subscribers.
Current e-newsletter systems, like MailChimp or ConstantContact, also provide you with smart information about how many people are opening your news, and what content they’re interacting with. Using these analytics, you can decide how to best spend your on-line time, and to learn what content people find engaging.
These systems give you easy-to-use tools to keep on track, making sure that you only send information to recipients who want to get it, and that your content is the kind that’s always worth a click.
In the January 12 E-Newsletter session, I’m looking forward to sharing success stories and good practices. It will be a hands-on session, meant to give you the tools to start your own e-newsletter or to spur some new activity with your existing e-newsletter. Hope to see you there.