These are your inactive subscribers. You know them well enough to have them on your list, and they know you well enough to not unsubscribe. But for some reason or another, they’re just not that into you anymore. Some maybe never were, filtering your messages from the very outset into a folder that receives little attention, or even signing up with an email address they never check. Since the dawn of email until very recently, we had no real incentive to do anything special with these subscribers other than continue mailing to them hoping one day to get through. The cost of each subsequent message is very low (particularly compared to the upside from a click-through) and email success is a function of absolute activity, not relative. 200 click-throughs has always been worth more to your business than 175, even if you have to mail to 10,000 more people to get there.

The landscape has changed, however, and engagement metrics are now beginning to impact deliverability. What that means is that the unresponsive people on your list are making it harder to reach the responsive people. So it’s time to take a look at who these people are, and decide what you’re going to do about them, or else risking some downward pressure on your deliverability. There are three options to consider:

1. Remove inactives from your house file
2. Move inactives to a separate group for different treatment
3. Leave inactives in your house file and treat no differently

I’ll take a look at each and provide some context that might help you make a decision.

1. Remove inactives from your house file.
Taking the unresponsive people out of your house file altogether will result in an immediate lift on your engagement metrics. For example, if 5,000 people from your 20,000 name list has not opened a message in 13 months or more (the time frame I typically start with, since some responsiveness is geared around annual events such as membership renewals, annual conferences and holidays), simply omitting them from your next mailing can boost your open and click-through rates by 33%. If you’re at industry averages, your 20% open rate that drove 4,000 opens previously will still see the same 4,000 readers, but from the 15,000 people remaining on your list. You’ve climbed to 26.7%, sacrificing no absolute results and increasing the percentage of your recipients who interact with your message. This lift in engagement metrics signals to ISPs and email administrators that you’re a legitimate sender, decreasing the likelihood that your messages will be shuffled off to junk folders or bounced – a bona fide upside across your entire email program. The downside is that there is always the risk that you’ve assumed incorrectly – that someone who appears inactive is still seeing your messages in the inbox and waiting for the one that grabs her attention. The longer someone is inactive the less likely this is the case, but it is still something to factor into your decision.

2. Move inactives to a separate group for different treatment.
This approach mitigates the downside from option 1, in that you’re not cutting inactives loose entirely. Instead, you’re targeting them like you would any other segment of your list. Only instead of sending them messages based on what they have done or bought in the past, you’re sending them messages based on what they haven’t done. One approach is a dedicated win-back campaign, where you expressly point out that you haven’t heard from them and try to re-engage in some way. Another is pare down the frequency of the messages, only sending them the ones of the greatest strategic importance. These may be the announcement that registration for the big conference is now open, or changes in content or products or features that may appeal to them and shake them back into activity. Like any kind of targeting, this approach requires a little extra effort. But you will recognize the same lift in engagement metrics on the messages they don’t receive, which will still signal to ISPs that you’re on the level and your messages deserve to pass the velvet rope.

3. Leave inactives in the house file and treat no differently.
Technically, this is the “do nothing” approach and is a viable option based on your circumstances. If your deliverability and engagement metrics are already strong, despite a significant number of inactives in your list, maintaining your status quo could be justifiable. Remember that even unread messages carry a branding impact. If you do elect to leave your inactives in place, make sure that your subject lines still speak to them and work towards re-engaging them. Telegraph your message content so that even subscribers who only glance at their unread messages still feel like they’re in the loop with your brand.

An important consideration for any of these options is where your inactive subscribers came from in the first place. People who actively subscribed to your list or made a purchase showed a significant level of engagement at one point, and are more likely to be re-engaged in the future. But if your inactives are names acquired through a channel with low engagement (such as a list of trade show attendees you exhibited at, or a purchased list), the chance of them suddenly awakening to your brand after a year of ignoring it are slim. Better to cut them loose and lift your deliverability and engagement metrics.

Share this article

Social Magnet is the solution. For the first time, marketers can use cross-channel analytics to quantify how much email, Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn are contributing to results. No more guessing, assumptions or missed opportunities. Data-driven and actionable, Social Magnet is nothing less than a full integration of the most important social channels into Real Magnet.

View Cross Channel Analytics

Email vs. Facebook vs. Twitter Tracking

Social Magnet’s cross-channel analytics is the game changer in email + social integration.

• Learn how much email, Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn are each contributing globally towards marketing results.
• Associate social messages to emails in order to attribute clicks to each channel.
• Track by category to see if Twitter is better than email for webinar promotions, or if Facebook is the best place to promote your latest blog.
• Social Magnet also includes social analytics not available through Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn, including daily follower trends, engagement metrics, a calendar view, geolocation metrics and mobile usage.

View Your Social Feeds

View feeds/post content to social sites directly from the Real Magnet interface

Social Magnet includes a comprehensive dashboard to view all your social feeds from all your organization’s social accounts in one place.

• Twitter timelines, mentions and retweets
• Facebook news feeds including all Likes and Comments
• LinkedIn updates

Create and Post Social Content

Join the conversations you monitor by posting content to any of your social channels directly from Real Magnet. More than just a social dashboard, however, Social Magnet is part of the same Real Magnet application used to create email messages, allowing for fully integrated digital communications management, tracking and analysis.

• Tweet or retweet messages
• Post to Facebook
• Share updates on LinkedIn
• Add trackable links to posts in any channel
• Attach any post to a specific email message or to a category for even narrower analytics and attribution
• Schedule messages in advance for any channel

Enterprise Level Functionality

Social Magnet allows for a virtually unlimited number of users and accounts, allowing for enterprise level management of your entire digital communications program. As more organizations mobilize staff and teams to support social channels, Social Magnet is already prepared to orchestrate and analyze.

Grow Your Audiences and Deepen Engagement

Other Real Magnet features allow for even deeper integration across digital channels:

SWYN: Add Share With Your Network (SWYN) links to email messages to allow your subscribers to post your content to Facebook, Twitter or LinkedIn.

Facebook Page Subscription Form: Add a custom email subscription form to your Facebook page, bringing social users straight into your house list for increased targeting and pan-channel engagement.

Share this article

The operative word here is “internal.” It’s one thing to tell your employees to stop emailing the person in the adjacent cube, but another thing entirely to expect all the company’s customers, partners and vendors to get on board with the policy. The company is Atos, an IT firm that counts among its clients the Olympic Games. With a zero email policy, what is it going to do when someone buys tickets to the 4-man bobsledding event online, or orders a souvenir Olympic mascot coffee mug – tweet them a purchase confirmation for their records, or ask them to fan the Olympics on Facebook in order to download and print their tickets?

More laughable than laudable, the Atos policy is showing up in FastCompany as an example of a management decision to improve internal communications. But the idea overlooks the staggering value of the email network Atos and all other companies are part of. Metcalfe’s Law says that the value of a network increases exponentially with the number of connected users. With billions of active email addresses worldwide, this makes email likely the most valuable network every in the history of the world. Social media still lags considerably but is nevertheless valuable. The secret to improved communications within email and social is not to eschew the network altogether, but to find ways of increasing the value – to everybody – of the part of the network your brand is most closely connected to.

How do you do that? Here are a few ways you can increase the net worth of your email and social networks:

1. Add Users: The lynchpin of Metcalfe’s Law is the number of connected users. A billion people on Facebook do not directly benefit you, though the hundreds or thousands of fans you have do. Obviously, you want to continue increasing the number of people who follow you on social channels and subscribe to your emails. But Metcalfe’s Law implies that the increase in value is not just from the users within a network able to connect to a hub (which in this case is you) but to each other. Having 5,000 fans on Facebook who only listen to you is not nearly as valuable – in Metcalfe’s terms – as 500 who communicate with you and each other. Driving the “social” component of social media is particularly important to a network’s value.

2. Listen and respond: We’re talking about communications networks after all, not broadcast networks. (Metcalfe’s Law was developed to explain telecommunications technology, not TV or radio.) The people in your network will find greater value in it if they know you are listening and responding. Over the past few years, we’ve heard our customers breathing a collective sigh of relief when the companies they followed on blogs, Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn actually began to respond to their questions, comments and complaints. After a decade of “do not reply” email addresses, attention was something they were exchanging with companies, not simply giving to them. Make sure you track all mentions and comments in your social channels, and you have a process for responding to – and even inviting – replies to your email as well. Conversations are harder to tune out than mere broadcasts.

3. Rise above the clutter: I’ve said before that the greatest obstacle you face in the inbox is the clutter from all the other messages in there that aren’t yours. The same is true of social media. In both channels, some of your audience is learning to triage, filter, sort and prioritize messages, which helps you if your brand makes the attention cut. But there are also some tools available to help your key messages rise above the din. Facebook Ads are a powerful and relatively inexpensive way to elevate the visibility of some of your messages with strategic importance – both to your fans and also their friends and other targets you identify. Twitter also offers Promoted Tweets that serve a similar purpose. Don’t dismiss either of these as mere advertising. Instead, think of them as amplifiers – they take the messages you want your audience to see, and make them louder. There is no direct inbox correlation to these features, though of course spam and junk filters are designed to serve a similar purpose. Curiously, the author of the article in FastCompany.com I referenced at the top posited an inbox solution of his own, where USPS takes control of email and implements stamp-like fees and expenses to discourage illegitimate senders and allow senders to elevate the stature of their messages in the inbox. I think he was kidding, or at least I hope he was; I have not received a desirable piece of postal mail in about 4 years now, despite a daily armful for the recycling bin.

Share this article

I was asked to speak on fundamentals, which for me means strategy. I presented “9 Fundamentals of a Strategic Email Program.”  The one that seemed to garner the most attention was on, well, attention. So that is what I focused on in this week’s MediaPost article.

Attention, not Permission, Makes Email a Strategic Communications Asset
by Mike May
Published in MediaPost’s Email Insider, 12-14-2011

We refer to email as a permission-based channel, but permission is not really the objective of an email program. It’s the cost of doing business, to be sure. Before anything else, you need to have earned the right to reach out to a customer or prospect through email.

But the real objective of your email program is attention. The critical role of attention in email occurred to me last week at a conference. While many of you were at the Email Insider Summit in snowy Utah, I was getting a few more days’ use out of my flip-flops in Miami Beach, speaking at the Specialty Information Publishers Association Annual Marketing Conference. (You had better skiing, but my hotel had yacht parking. Seriously.) I spoke there about how recognizing and honoring the distinction between attention and permission is the difference between using email as a mere tool, and considering it a strategic communications asset.

If you’re a parent, particularly of a child between four and 18 years old, you already know the distinction I’m talking about. No doubt you have permission to talk to your kids whenever you want. But do you always have your kids’ attention? Permission just gets you in the game, but attention is where results come from.

To consider your email program as a strategic communications asset, think of it as a jar full of pennies. Sometimes you need to draw against that asset to meet the needs of your business. Maybe it is by sending another reminder email when your first didn’t get the results you needed, or emailing to your list on behalf of a partner you’re doing business with who insisted on reaching your subscribers as part of a sponsorship or other deal. Maybe you have to tweak the content of your educational and informational newsletter to be a little more promotional to hit your numbers by the end of the quarter. We all have to do this, and I’m not about to tell you to stop. What good is an asset if you can’t use it to drive your business forward? But we also have to remember that every time we compromise the attention our subscribers have lent us, we’re taking pennies out of that jar. We are diminishing the value of our asset.

Imagine that instead of being an email marketer, you run a retail distribution center for apparel specialty stores. One of the assets you rely on in your business is a forklift, which you use to lift, transport and load pallets of jeans and handbags and graphic T-shirts onto trucks, where they’re shipped off to different stores. Your forklift would do you no good if you were afraid to use it for fear of it breaking, so of course you end up using it all the time. But then you get so reliant on it that if it were to break down, your business would grind to a screeching halt. Instinctively we realize this, so we keep the forklift topped off with fluids, perform regular maintenance — and, I don’t know, send it to a forklift spa. I’m not exactly sure what makes a forklift happy but if my business counts on it I’d figure it out, and do it.

We need to regard and treat our email programs in the same way the warehouse manager treats his forklift. Since it is impossible to fully preserve the pristine value of that asset and actually derive some value from it, our only choice  – if we want to have a strong and vital email program in the future — is to replenish the asset as we use it. If we are taking pennies out of the jar, we need to find ways to put them back in.

To be more precise then, the objective of a strategic email program is not permission, and not just attention, but sustainable attention. There are times we need to take advantage of the attention we have earned, and times when we have to reward our subscribers for the attention they have given us. Adding new subscribers, restoring a content balance that satisfies our audience, adding a preferences center and improving our targeting and segmenting all help replenish the value of our email asset, and add pennies back to that jar. Only in this way can we ensure that the strategic communications asset our business relies on today will be just as useful in the coming years.

Share this article

But I realized as I was finishing it that as a conference session it has a glaring shortcoming. What’s the first thing your colleagues ask you as soon as you return from a conference? OK, never mind. What’s the second thing? They want to know what you’ve learned. And by that they mean, what can you do today that makes our jobs easier? My presentation gives plenty of advice, but it’s the kind of work that requires meetings and planning and budget allocations, not quick fixes.

I knew I’d never be invited back if I didn’t balance the long view of the email program with the near-term needs of conference attendees, so I concluded with a section called “7 Things You Can Do To Boost Your Email Results This Week.” Because really, if you’re going to work hard to preserve your email program for the future, you might as well make sure it works as well as possible for you today:

1. Hyperlink like you highlight: If we think that when our subscribers get our emails, they expand them to the full screen, turn off their instant messenger, mute their phone and immerse themselves fully in our missives, we’re delusional. Even “read” is often a generous term. Many subscribers scan, their eyes naturally alighting on the words or phrases that are hyperlinked. So treat your hyperlinks like a highlighter, and include the whole phrase you want to catch your subscriber’s eye. Instead of linking “click here” link “click here to save $100 on conference registration.”

2. Post your newsletter online: Real Magnet offers a link to view a message online. Use this link from the message you send as a test to yourself and post it on Facebook, Twitter, your blog, and any other media that’s suitable. You’ll reach new audience with the same content (and also some of the 50% – 80% who are subscribed but do not read everything you send), and also promote the existence of the newsletter, drawing in new subscribers.

3. Create a mobile template: Return Path published some research this week that revealed a 37% increase in mobile email readership over the past six months. Some of our clients have reported that as many as 30% – 40% of their opens on some campaigns are coming from mobile devices. If you want to boost your results, make it easier for the mobile population – now fully at critical mass – to read your messages and take action.

4. Be more social: Email works better if your brand is stronger. One way for your brand to become stronger and more relevant to your customers is to increase your presence in other channels, like social. By tweeting more often, posting more pictures on Facebook, and engaging in more social conversations, you are generating more brand impressions among your audience, which increases their anticipation for your emails.

5. Unstick stock messages: When someone subscribes to your email, fills out a form on your site or makes a purchase, they are at their most engaged with your brand. Yet it as these instances that we rely on canned email confirmations and auto-responses. When is the last time you looked at yours? Are the messages your subscribers are receiving at these moments of piqued interest taking full advantage of their attention?

6. Edit more; write less: Lester Wunderman, the founder of direct marketing, remarked that the right length for any direct response communication is as long as it can be and still hold the reader’s attention. I think the same is true, but the window of attention has narrowed considerably. To many of your subscribers, 140 characters now constitute a complete paragraph. Write shorter messages that adapt better to shortened attention spans and increased clutter.

7. Send from a person, not a “team”: Another trend we have social media to thank for is the expectation from our customers that they are doing business with people, not a nameless, faceless company. The irony of email as the “true one-to-one communications channel” devolving into another mass reach channel should not be lost on us. It’s time to make it conversational again, where real people are identifiably involved and accountable for responses. Saying a message is from a “team” is the same as saying “do not reply”. It’s a sentiment that does not allow your customers to be well taken care of at all.

Share this article

It’s no wonder CyberMonday was a week-long event, actually. With all that email clutter and literally dozens of messages in my inbox screaming almost the same exact subject line, multiple sends were likely necessary for many merchants to command the attention they wanted. Some reports are measuring the use of “Cyber Monday” in subject lines this year up 10 percentage points over last year, and that doesn’t even include the “Cyber Monday” messages sent on days other than Cyber Monday.

The day itself has grown to enormous significance for online retailers, and is the busiest of the year for many of them. So it makes sense for each individual retailer to do everything it can to take advantage of the mindshare that Cyber Monday creates. The problem is what happens in inboxes as retailers collectively all employ the same exact tactic. Instead of differentiation, sameness and clutter ensue. And emails designed to drive action urgently are glossed over and archived instead, as the triage process becomes too onerous.

That is the fate of a lot of well-conceived ideas: they work great, until everybody else starts using them. Then they backfire and ultimately have to be abandoned, along with the marketing gains they originally created. Here are a few other great ideas in email, whose popularity now renders them ineffective:

1. The Daily Deal: Groupon was a great idea. LivingSocial ripped it off wholesale, but executed it well so they’re still doing fine. But now I’m getting Daily Deals from half a dozen retailers I’ve shopped at over the past year, and even publishers who have a daily audience they’re trying to further leverage. There is no more room on this bandwagon. Even if you have an audience’s attention every day, or you have something to sell every day and could aggregate an audience with it, the Daily Deal is no longer a differentiation tactic. It makes a brand look like they couldn’t think of anything else to do (the same reaction to giving away an iPad as a trade show promotion, so it’s time to stop that as well).

2. Subscription Creep: I’m a strong advocate of creating new newsletters to better target niches within your subscriber base. But I’m noticing a variation of the trend that runs afoul of email best practices, particularly when everybody starts doing it. Increasingly, marketers are creating new newsletters – niche or otherwise – and then adding their entire subscriber base to the distribution list. Now if you really like a brand that is sending you email, you might appreciate the newsletter and stay subscribed. But if 20 other brands have all started sending you new newsletters that you didn’t expressly opt into, you’ve about had it with the 21st, even if it comes from your BFF brand. A better idea is to use a trial send of 1-3 issues of the newsletter, with a header that informs your subscribers that they’re getting this as a trial and giving them a link to subscribe when the trial expires. If they don’t subscribe, respect their wishes and stop sending it to them. Otherwise they might unsubscribe from everything you send them, including the critical revenue-producing stuff.

3. Asking, “Are you sure you want to leave?” People unsubscribe. It’s inevitable, and given the common placement of the Unsubscribe link way at the bottom of an email, usually hidden in a muted typeface color and very small (itself a poor choice), it is rarely an accident when someone clicks on it. Yet many of the unsubscribe pages that follow challenge the subscriber’s action, asking them if they are sure they would like to unsubscribe, and insinuating that the click was somehow made in error. If the only place your subscribers were asked to double confirm their intention to leave were on the unsubscribe page, it would not be too egregious an offense. But now websites have taken to the practice, with Google leading the charge. Try to leave the site and you’re often served a popup that asks if you really mean to go. Compounded on top of the same challenge issued at unsubscribes, it is aggravating for your subscribers, even if Google is the chief offender. That’s really the heart of the issue with these tactics – that someone else pushes their acceptability past the limit, causing everyone who is using them to suffer. If it’s any consolation, it raises more ire against Google than it does against email marketers, since people try to leave Google’s site far more often than they unsubscribe from your lists.

Share this article

If you meet these qualifications please send us a link to your work samples and attach your Cover Letter / Resume To: jobs3@realmagnet.com.

Share this article

Sometimes though, you can learn a lot from individual messages, particularly your best messages. Real Magnet’s Reports module is particularly useful in this regard, as it allows you to quickly view your Highest Open Rate Messages or Subject Lines, Highest Click Through Rate Messages and your Lowest Unsubscribe Rate Messages. The reports are customizable by date, allowing you to go back over the past year or two (or more) to find your greatest hits. They are also able to be filtered by a minimum number of recipients. This is important as messages with fewer recipients are more targeted and often bust the curve. A message sent to 40 people who attended a dinner event that earns an 80% open rate is not as impressive as one sent to 5,000 people and pulls 60%. Make sure you choose an audience size that teaches you something about the type of messages you’re concerned with.

These messages are your greatest hits, your highlight reel. In order to drive the powerful results you see in your top performers, something – very likely many different things – had to be working exceptionally well. When you pull these reports to see what your most productive messages were, try to dissect them to determine why they worked so well so that you can duplicate and even build on their success. To do this, you’ll need to look not just at the top, but at the whole top of the range (which Real Magnet makes easy by allowing you to select how many results you’d like to see in the reports). It’s easier to discover why one message worked well when you can find 6 others in the top 10 with the same characteristics.

Here’s what to look for when analyzing your personal best email metrics:

Commonalities in Execution: Run a report of your Highest Open Rate Subject Lines over the past year, filtered by a minimum number of recipients that’s appropriate for your list size. Then sort so that the highest open rate is on the top and read through the subject lines. Do you see anything in common – maybe the use of a question, inclusion of a company name, the threat of danger or promise of success? What do the subject lines have in common, that you can pick up on, learn from, and weave into your next message?

Dead Ends and Red Herrings: Not finding answers in the report does not mean the answers don’t exist; you may just have to look someplace else for them. Maybe in the example above you can’t find any trends or commonalities that explain the success of your messages. That’s OK – it may be that your subject line is not the reason for your high open rates. Try running the report on Highest Open Rate by From Fields. Is there a Sender in your organization whose name is pulling better than the others?

Analyze External Context: One of the reasons I like to pull these reports over a year or two years is because not only does it give me a broader range of examples to find success, but it allows me to factor in seasonality. Look at the dates of all your top performers in any of your reports over the course of a year or two year. Is there a season or month that seems to be showing up more than others? Let’s say over half of your best messages are sent in July. I don’t recommend that you concentrate all your emailing into the heart of the summer. Rather, look at what else is going on in July that might be responsible. Is it because you’re sending a lot of messages in July and you have your audience’s attention? Or are you sending far fewer then so there is not as much clutter? The answers may not be in the report at all, though the report will tell you where else in your organization to look.

Share this article

I don’t know if this is what I’m going to talk about at #SIPAMiami, but it’s at least the framework from which I’ll build my presentation. Here are some of the email fundamentals that are easy to forget, but critical to revisit from time to time:

1. Email is Earned Media: Earned Media is a term that came into vogue with the advent of social media. What it means is that it is media where audience attention cannot be bought or co-opted, but must instead be given by the audience. I’ve said as much here in the past by pointing out that both email and social are permission-based channels. It’s an important fundamental to remember for its converse: earned media can also be taken away. If I had to give advice in an elevator to an email marketer, it would be to always balance the business objectives that email is supporting with the interests and environment of your subscribers. If it’s a really short elevator ride, I would distill it into a single word: empathy.

2. Success Metrics is plural: It’s very easy to get hung up on a specific metric when trying to determine if your email is working. Deliverability is important because it all starts there – messages that are not delivered cannot drive results. Open rate matters because it shows expectation and anticipation and is the first step in engagement. Click rate is critical because we are trying to drive action after all, aren’t we? Unsubscribes – OK, we usually ignore those because it’s unpleasant to think about. But they’re important too. They’re all important. Focusing too much on moving the needle on a single metric can compromise an email program. Employ clever parlor tricks to boost open rate and your click rate will drop if the content inside isn’t telegraphed well in the subject line. If clicks get all your attention then you may be focusing too much on what you want, instead of what your subscribers need. And if all you think about is deliverability, you may not be putting enough energy into engagement metrics. For all its tactics, email marketing is still a big picture discipline, and has to be evaluated from a broad perspective, not narrow.

3. Lists don’t grow themselves: You probably get some unsubscribes and hard bounces with every send, so your list wears down over time. If your objective is to simply break even with your list size, you need to find some way of finding, qualifying and adding new subscribers. But you don’t want to break even, do you? What is appealing about email is that the energy you put into a message for 1,000 subscribers is the same energy needed to mail to 100,000. So we’d always like a larger list to defray our resources and boost overall response. Acquisition becomes really important, yet is one of the most neglected fundamentals in email marketing. It shouldn’t be.

4. Effectiveness matters more than ROI: Marketers tout the ROI of email marketing, but that metric is a bit of a red herring. The relative expense of other media compared to search advertising, print, direct mail, radio or TV is so low that ROI can’t help but be outstanding in comparison. But if your objective is to get 1,000 people to your conference, a cost-per-attendee from email of $.50 compared to $4 in search is not worth crowing about if you only sign up 37 attendees through email. Keep your eye on the prize. Your goal is not for email to work efficiently – it’s to be effective.

5. Email is an asset, not a tool: The fundamental difference being that a tool is something you use, and an asset is something of value you want to hold onto. The act of sending an email is very tactical, but managing an email program well is a highly strategic endeavor, requiring a long view. If you think of your email program as asset, it will be easier to focus on preserving – even increasing – its value over time. Sometimes you need to draw against an asset, but we need to be equally concerned with replenishing it. That means finding the right content balance, continuing to recruit new subscribers, segmenting messages so that you’re remaining relevant, even creating new newsletters and content channels to better serve niches within your subscriber base. It requires being proactive and devoting resources to do more than just send the email out, but it is essential for preserving the long-term health of your email program.

Share this article

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.

Share this article