On the cutting edge of the marketing business, there are a few newish truisms when it comes to digital media – web 2.0-style design is definitely here to stay, and social media (Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Flickr, YouTube, etc.) is a new, if ever-changing, reality.
But we also know that it is important to be pro-active with your customers, and your potential customers.
While useful and important, Twitter, Facebook, websites and blogs are all passive communication channels. The most pro-active methods of communication are pretty labour-intensive – just pick up the phone, or send an e-mail.
One mantra in our business for years and years, was to send a newsletter. Be it e-mail or snail-mail, just do it!
It accomplishes a few objectives:
- You “touch base” with people, if informally.
- By including “general information” about your industry, you establish yourself as a credible source within your industry.
- When it comes time to use or recommend your service, theoretically you will be top of mind for the person who receives your regular communications, whether they just delete it every time it comes in, or they actually read it.
There are a thousand good reasons to do it, but it has always been easier said than done. Who is responsible for designing and compiling it? Who is responsible for proof-reading it? Who has time to write content? What should we say? Are we saying too little? Are we saying too much?
Even for our organization, which boldly preaches the message, and truly believes it to be an effective, pro-active form of marketing, we rarely made it happen in communication with our customers in the past.
Fast forward to now, and blogs rule the world. Every company has one (or should). Theoretically, it’s the new newsletter – call it Newsletter 2.0.
With RSS, people can subscribe, and if they regularly read their subscribed blogs in their RSS reader, then they will see your message all the time! Unforunately, while RSS gives us a high-tech method to pro-actively reach customers, the reality is that most customers don’t incorporate it into their day, and even if they do, it’s just another highly passive, generally ignored channel.
In short – your clients are not waiting with bated breath for your latest dollops of wisdom to arrive in their RSS reader.
The reality remains, therefore, that the newsletter is king, and should still be strongly considered for its proven merits.
For those who just cannot find the time to make a newsletter, like us, we recommend FeedBurner, a pretty amazing RSS tool that lets you do all sorts of fun and interesting geeky things with your RSS feed.
By enabling Email Subscriptions, you allow people to subscribe to your website blog, but to receive their subscription by e-mail. So, you still get out your “newsletter”, only it’s arriving in chunks, as blog entries. As long as you are not blogging 7 times a day, annoying people to no end, you accomplish the same objectives as sending out a newsletter, and you do so as part of your routine, not as a separate and tedious process.
[...] statistics alone make it worthwhile, but the other features that exist are incredible, including e-mail subscriptions. For WordPress, there is a plugin called FD Feedburner, which will redirect your feed automatically [...]