Newsletters: The Stable Marketing Channel

Old School is New School

Email, otherwise known as e-mail, or electronic mail, is one of the oldest Internet and general network communication mediums. Variations of email have been used since the 1970s. Like real mail, email has a long history of being heavily used to send and receive advertisements and other marketing material. Over the past few decades, email providers have spent a considerable amount of effort reducing spam and abuse across email systems. That means that email can have mixed results when it comes to blind conversion rates. Nevertheless, email marketing continues to be a stable marketing channel to past and present customers or users.

Newsletters are a form of email marketing that is sent regularly, often with new or updated information, like deals, sneak peaks, or articles that highlight a specific topic of interest. Newsletters specifically provide a targeted way to continually market to and remind your customers about your products and services.

If you aren't leveraging email newsletters, you might be making a big business mistake.

Physical and Digital

If you work in physical marketing and advertisements, you may have heard of direct mail marketing. Direct mail marketing involves sending physical advertisements, often in the form of postcards or catalogs, to real addresses. For local business, this is one of the most effective tools available. However, the level of effectiveness goes up drastically when you use targeted direct mail marketing. Targeted marketing uses existing data lists of known customers or potential customers who have explicitly shown interest. These lists tend to perform better because they are curated to those who are ready to convert.

On the Internet though, except for websites themselves, there really aren't home addresses. Instead, the only reliable way to target the same kinds of demographics is through email marketing. Unlike physical addresses, email addresses tend to follow a person wherever they go, especially if those emails are associated with existing established services like Google, or Apple. This can make curating and maintaining a list incredibly important for a business long-term.

Each time you engage with a potential or converting customer, it's important to try and get their permission to market to them via email. There are a number of ways to collect email, many of which do not need to be invasive or make use of deceptive patterns. The next time you have the opportunity, ask your web development team to implement ethical email capture, or contact PxO Ink LLC to learn more.

Compliant Email Marketing

When it comes to email marketing, it's important to follow the rules. Globally there a lot of individual regulations and requirements that you must follow in order to be in compliance when sending email for business purposes, including privacy law requirements. In the United States, the CAN-SPAM Act set the tone for how businesses can comply when leveraging email marketing. Accessibility is also an important consideration. To learn more about the rules, check out the FTC's website, FCC's website, and the CCPA website.

Why Newsletters?

Despite the fact that the concept is quite old at this point, the statistics show that newsletters are actually a powerful and reliable method to engage with your users. In order to comply with regulations, newsletters are generally opt-in (and in some cases, double opt-in,) which means that users who sign-up for a newsletter want to be delivered regular information from the company they signed up with. There is no better targeted demographic for marketing than one which has explicitly asked to be marketed to.

When customers begin engaging in your newsletters, they are more likely to join or become engaged in the community as a whole. Community-driven marketing is important when it comes to curating a robust and reliable userbase. Engaging customers not only stimulates outreach to convert on whatever product or service is being advertised in the moment, but it also sets the stage for future conversions too.

Once you have started to curate a list, you can plan and execute regular newsletters and gauge results through email marketing analytics. This analysis will tell you how effective your newsletters are and what changes need to be made to maximize efficiency.

Technology and Infrastructure

When it comes to the technology related to sending newsletters, the aforementioned efforts that providers have gone through to reduce abuse can make it hard to attain high deliverability. As such, you may need to plan the infrastructure out ahead of time, and decide whether you want to self-host to ensure control and privacy, or go with a third-party directly to outsource the labor. In either case, you may also need to decide whether acquiring and priming a dedicated Internet Protocol (IP) address is necessary to reach your conversion goals.

For most small businesses, using a third-party service with a low monthly fee will work perfectly well; as long as they have a standing policy to rotate your IP address if it becomes tainted by abuse. For medium-to-large businesses, it is often a mistake not to consider self-hosting and maintaining your own infrastructure to send, even if you leverage a qualified Mail Transport Agent, or MTA, to handle delivery.

When it comes to designing and drafting emails, that can be quite tricky too. Emails look and sometimes behave like websites, but the actual technology would seem obsolete to today's Web standards. Email development requires a capable hand to craft, and the work that goes into writing engaging emails should not be understated. Thankfully, we now have the tools to expedite some of this, including MJML.

Start Marketing Today

Email marketing is often something that is overlooked by businesses. Even if you don't want to go through building out and scheduling regular newsletters, you shouldn't sleep on email marketing. Regular newsletters are certainly something that PxO Ink LLC recommends to our clients.

In any case, at the very least, starting to capture and curate an email list is something that every business should work on, especially when it comes to re-engaging with past customers.

If you would like help with your digital marketing today, let us know!