Who Says E-Newsletters Don't Work?

There's a widespread and mistaken belief that e-mail newsletters don't work any more. Doubters say that spam filters have rendered them ineffective. Don't you believe it.

On Wednesday I'll publish the October 5, 2005 Professional Marketing Newsletter to 4,100 opt-in subscribers. Sure, some of the newsletters will get blocked by SpamAssassin or Postini. Others will go out to bad email addresses. But I'll still get more readers than I have subscribers.

How is this possible? On August 23 I broadcast out 4,100 newsletters. A counter I put in the code showed it was read by 5,904 readers. It's the magic of forwarding -- the passalong rate. 

I made this point in this month's cover story of Law Office Computing, "Read All About It - Effective e-newsletters take  the marketing lead ."  If you're a subscriber and have this month's password, just Read All About It to read the article,

E-newsletters still work and often are superior marketing and value-added vehicles because:

• An e-newsletter still is the fastest and most personal way to deliver a marketing message to clients and prospects.
• They are the most cost-effective form of “push” marketing. A newsletter that must be printed and mailed not only is more expensive, but also takes longer to produce and mail.
• They easily show return on investment by measuring the number of messages opened, what elements the recipient read and whether the destination address was correct. Web sites and blog traffic reports come close, but can’t match this detailed measurability.
• Corporate general counsel list e-newsletters as one of the top 10 things they want to see on a law firm Web site, according to TouchPoint Metrics of San Rafael, Calif.
• E-newsletters still take advantage of viral marketing in that they are easy to forward. The Professional Marketing e-Newsletter (which I publish) has an open rate of 126 percent, meaning more people read it than actually subscribe to it because it’s passed along to others.
• E-newsletters are the best way to find out exactly who visits your Web site. The Web site log will reveal the Internet Protocol addresses of visitors, but a newsletter sign-up form on a firm Web site can capture the person’s name, e-mail address and demographic information.
• By following best practices, e-newsletters manage to get through the recipients’ firewalls, spam filters and technical roadblocks because they come from a trusted source or have been whitelisted by recipients.
• E-newsletters offer the colorful beauty and design of Web sites and magazines by using HTML coding.

Comments

[Kevin O'Keefe]

Larry, I am surprised you would inflate the open rate on your email newsletters as a way to show their effectiveness.

Open rates for email newsletters can be bogus. The open rate is generally tracked through the use of a tiny invisible graphic that sits on the publisher's server. When a recipient opens the publisher's email, the tiny invisible graphic is downloaded, and each download is detected and marked as an open.

Email recipients generally use use the preview feature of their email client. In preview mode, the email will go ahead and grab the invisible tracking graphic and therefore register as having been "opened." The recipient, however, might never have really opened your email, or even glanced at it. The same thing happens when the email newsletter is forwarded.

And for viral marketing, sure there is some bounce with a forward but when was the last time you saw people writing articles on the net referencing someones newsletters?

Email newsletters still play some role in law firm marketing but their role is declining. Large firms using blogs & RSS say the blogs cost less and are having far greater impact than their previous email newsletters.