This week for MediaPost I wrote about The Newsletter Renaissance. The topic came up with I had a conversation with one of our clients earlier in the week, who told me how they had cut back on the number of newsletters they were sending to their clients. That set me to thinking, and I started to look around in my own inbox to see if some of my favorite newsletters were still showing up. Sure enough, I found a bona fide trend – newsletters are not enjoying their previous popularity.

But they should. They’re a hardworking yet unheralded communications asset. They do more work than their metrics often suggest. Read on to see how.

The Newsletter Renaissance
by Mike May
published in MediaPost’s Email Insider, 11-16-11

Most email marketers I talk to are much more mindful of inbox clutter than ever, and many are taking steps to cull the number of messages they send out to subscribers –- often starting with the least targeted and lowest ROI. The axe seems to fall on the email newsletter pretty frequently. Often sent to “everybody,” the newsletter can qualify as untargeted. And newsletters designed to inform or educate, but not necessarily drive action, often do work as prescribed: they don’t drive action. Judging them by their analytics allows a marketer to draw the conclusion that they don’t work, and can be sacrificed in the name of some inbox breathing room.

The other reason I hear of newsletters falling out of favor is that marketers are relying on Facebook and Twitter to maintain regular contact with their audiences. The time needed to tweet or post a couple times a day is far less than what used to go into writing, formatting, editing, testing and sending the newsletter. Newsletters require more work than quipping into social channels. They’re also less fun and less gratifying as a status update that earns dozens of comments or a tweet that sparks a bantering exchange.

But the added work of newsletters is not wasted, not by a long shot. They are harder to produce because with emails we are building a strategic communications asset, slowly and over time. It doesn’t have the glitz of a sparkling social strategy or the glamour of a glossy magazine ad, but its role in the communications plan should nevertheless be protected. The work it does may not show up in click-through metrics, but its impact on customer contact, message frequency and brand narrative is significant.

Instead of waning usage of the email newsletter, here is why I think newsletters will (or at least should) enjoy a renaissance:

The brand sets the narrative. I’m quick to extol the virtues of social media in brand conversations, and often remind clients that sometimes letting go of a brand’s message and putting it into the hands of customers can turn a tidy ROI. But the message we want our customers to carry out into the world has to start somewhere. Regular newsletters that build on the brand’s story week after week and month after month can do that. Advertisers talk about optimum frequency required for a message to take hold, whether it’s through a 468×60 or a :30 spot. Frequency is not the exclusive domain of advertising. Newsletters allow a message to be repeated, nuanced and updated over time, reminding your customers of the story they’re telling on your behalf, and helping to keep it accurate.

Gravity is higher in the inbox. Most emailers, no matter how experienced, still feel that hint of anxiety every time they’re hitting the “send” button, hoping they’ve double-checked all the links and haven’t missed any embarrassing typos. Mistakes in an email are not only embarrassing; they are also damaging, as they represent a lack of respect to the audience earned and tended over time. Yet tweets like, “Oops, try this link instead” and “Damn iPhone auto-correct!” are de rigueur.  I suppose you can claim that social media is just more casual, but to me errors like that look like the guy who left the house with half his collar tucked into his shirt’s neckline. When gravity weighs more heavily in a channel, it means the channel matters more. I’m not saying that it’s necessarily more effective, but customers know when more energy is spent communicating with them. The difference between a well-crafted monthly newsletter, designed to educate, entertain and/or edify them and “Happy Monday! What did everybody do this weekend?” is not lost on them.

Creating newsletters is a productive exercise regimen. One of the most important questions asked regularly in marketing departments across the country is, “So what are we going to put in the newsletter this week?” The newsletter’s insistence on being published on schedule forces a company — every week or month — to take inventory of what it is doing for its customers that is useful or valuable. In this way, the newsletter acts like the weekly staff meeting — the one you don’t want to go to without any meaningful progress to report on. The newsletter spurs activity, and helps make sure your company creates, communicates or otherwise sources something of value for your subscribers. The staff meeting’s thinly veiled purpose is to keep us from slacking off. The newsletter serves the same role, and it’s an important one, particularly given how often we ask our subscribers to do something for us instead.

So cut your newsletters some slack. They do good work, but simply aren’t as good as managing upwards as some of the more self-aggrandizing communications channels.

The Newsletter is the workhouse of email formats among our clients. Most have at least one, some have a few, and quite a few have an entire portfolio of them. But saying that it’s the most popular format would be like saying meat is the most popular type of food. Chicken nuggets are a world apart from pork tenderloin in a bourbon maple glaze, yet both are technically meats. (Well, the tenderloin is anyway. Jury is still out on the nuggets.) Similarly, “Newsletter” encompasses just as vast a range of communications.

Many act as a sort of communications catchall; whatever the sending company wants its customers or members to know about them goes into the newsletter. These can be effective among highly engaged subscribers, who read the newsletter for a deeper dive into the goings on at the company, or to make sure they don’t miss a deadline or other opportunity. In fact, if your organization uses a newsletter that is principally first-person focused, designed to talk about your company and its news, and your open rates and click-throughs remain strong over the months and years, then congratulations – you have right there some evidence of a highly engaged audience.

There is also an opportunity for newsletters to create, instead of just validate, engagement. The shorthand explanation for how these work is to simply flip the focus of the newsletter from the sender to the recipient. But in order for that tactic to be successful, a few other elements need to be in place, so that’s what I’ll focus on today.

Objective: With a newsletter designed to position yours as a voice of authority, your objective is to educate, inform and generally be of use. To be an authority, you need to demonstrate you know something your audience has not learned yet, and then share it – consistently and reliably.

Content Strategy: The focus of your content s is not what your company or organization is doing, but what news  in the industry your constituency of subscribers should know about. Think industry trends instead of corporate announcements, and best practices and how-to over profiling your own customers or members in case studies. The finished product should almost read as if it could have come from any of your industry’s leading authorities – which is precisely the point. You want your organization to be considered among the media companies or analysts or other publications that sit at the center of your industry, surveying it all. To get there, the content strategy must be similar to what these organizations would adopt for the same authoritative objective.

Uniqueness: Note that I said “similar” above, and not “the same.” It’s not enough to just pull feeds from other news sources that cover the industry, or otherwise repurpose what is already available. Some unique content is also necessary. Remember, you are not just trying to aggregate eyeballs like an industry digest that sells ads. They aim to be a resource through convenience, saving their subscribers the trouble of finding all the news themselves. You wan to go a little further than that, and demonstrate your editorial expertise. To do this, you will either need to create some content of your own, or source content from places that are outside of the mainstream, but still highly relevant and useful to your audience.

Distribution: Here is where the advantage of the authoritative newsletter really shines. Distribution is less about who you should send it to, and more about how the content strategy of the newsletter can pull in new subscribers and drive more engagement. Social Magnet in particular can be a powerful tool. Many business users rely on social media to keep in touch with industry trends, so Facebook status updates and tweets that telegraph some of the specific content within your newsletter, driving people to a sign-up link or web version of the newsletter as a sample, can be a highly effective strategy for growing distribution.

There is room in most organizations’ portfolios for both types of newsletters, the one about the sending company, and the one organized around the needs and interest of subscribers. They serve different purposes and even if they do not reach entirely different audiences, they certainly engage different people. If your organization’s objectives include growing your audience, building industry leadership, and creating deeper engagement with your existing subscribers, an authoritative newsletter should be high on your to-do list.

Newsletters are usually aimed right at the middle of your audience. Typically, they’re written to include something for everyone. To each of your readers, that means there’s some content that’s not a direct hit. But many of your readers will still find what’s relevant, and look forward to the next one.

What happens when your list grows? Previously aiming at the middle made sense, since the population of subscribers outside of the middle was too small for a dedicated content channel. Take a look at the size of your list over the past few years. Are the edges still small enough to roll into the mainstream? Or do you have large enough (or strategically important enough) sub-groups to create a new and narrower newsletter?

I love the newsletter for the same reason many of our clients do – it’s the easiest way to push all of our top stories out to our entire subscriber base all at once. What newsletters lack in targeting they make up for in anticipation – because they’re formulaic, it’s easy to keep them on schedule. Subscribers expect them, open them, read them.

But your newsletter strategy doesn’t have to be targeting deficient. I like the newsletter so much that I think many organizations should launch more of them – smaller in scale, narrow in content focus, and aimed at a strategically important subset of your subscriber list. Your list won’t have the same heft, but the more relevant content can drive higher open rates and clicks, and do a better job engaging your subscribers with your organization.

If you’d like to get bigger results from your newsletter strategy, think smaller. Try these tips for launching a niche newsletter aimed at a subset of your subscriber base:

Measure the size of your niche by impact, not subscribers. What subset of your subscriber base should you target for a niche newsletter? It’s probably not the largest group. Chances are, they’re the ones most likely to be well-served by your existing newsletter. Look instead for the group that’s the most strategically important to you, whose engagement means the most to your organization. If you’re an association, maybe it’s the class of membership that sponsors your events. Or if you’re a publisher it might be your premium subscribers. Maybe it’s your social network fans and followers, who are best able to help you reach new prospects. Don’t worry if the initial list is small – the right content strategy will grow the list. If you’re putting new resources into it, better to grow the list with the strongest ROI.

Follow the path of least content resistance. Even with narrower content, your newsletter’s stock-in-trade is its predictability. It needs to show up on schedule, every time. For that reason, when you figure out what it’s on and who will write it and how it will be laid out, don’t pull out all the stops. Pull out only the stops you’ll be able to pull out consistently, every time the newsletter has to go out. There’s no point in building something that your audience craves weekly, only to find that you don’t have the resources to meet their expectations.

Be “uniquely qualified.” As your newsletter content gets narrower, it’s less about your organization and more about the intersection between your organization and the target group. Notice that I didn’t say it’s just about what your target group wants to know. There are lots of sources for that information – whatever it is. Your job with a niche newsletter is to include content that your organization is uniquely qualified to provide. It’s not enough to provide targeted content – you need to roll out what’s not available or not credible from other sources.

Sample with an Opt-In/Out Trial. To my experience, most email marketing databases are like the lane dividers on New York City avenues – they’re more a directional suggestion than a set of hard rules. It’s easy to cross over them, and often wise to ignore them. So when your niche newsletter is ready for launch, I recommend rolling out a trial to your entire subscriber database instead of just the people you think might be interested. Send it with a preface that describes its content and frequency, and tell your subscribers that you’re sending them the first one (or two or even three) as samples. They can subscribe at any time, or they can unsubscribe and not receive any future installments. If they do nothing, they’ll only get the trial subscription and nothing more. This way, you’re sampling, not selling. Subscribing to a known quantity is safer than a vague and invisible promise. And you also might bring in subscribers who are outside of the niche as you identify it, but who are nevertheless interested.

A niche newsletter is a lot of planning and a steady commitment. But if it’s executed well it allows your organization to deepen its relationship with the people who matter the most. Not all subscribers are equal to your company, and niche newsletters are a great way to cozy up to the people your company loves.