Do You Still Need a Newsletter?
Has Your Blog Made Your Newsletter Irrelevant?
Image courtesy of Andy Newson / FreeDigitalPhotos.net
In the past, newsletters were a useful tool for communicating information to your customers and stakeholders about your organization. They tended to be lengthy, full of notices, updates, a couple of decent articles and maybe even a few ads for your products or services. Newsletters typically were sent via normal mail as well as email.
With the advent and mainstream popularity of blogs, however, the newsletter of old may in fact be obsolete and a waste of time, effort, information and resources. Considering the amount of time consumers read marketing collateral material, you may actually get more bang for your buck by circulating your blogs instead of trying to craft an in-depth quarterly newsletter.
Newsletters vs. Blogs
- You can use a blog post in ways that you never could with a newsletter. For example, you can post it on your social media sites, send it to your email lists, use it as a guest blog on other industry sites and shorten it for mobile communications.
- Instead of sending out a newsletter, send your blog to your email list instead. Your existing and prospective clients will appreciate the targeted brevity of your information, and you’ll benefit by putting your company name in front of their eyes.
- When you send a newsletter by email, you often have to attach a PDF file, which is the electronic format of the newsletter. Many of your customers, however, may not bother to even open the attachment. You can solve this problem by putting your blog post in the body of the email instead.
- Keep blog topics straight and simple. With a weekly blog, you can touch on one subject at a time. In a newsletter, important information can get lost among the multiple stories and topics.
- A newsletter doesn’t help your website page rank. Posting fresh content every week on your website through your blog posts pleases the search engines and gradually raises your page rank.
- Single-topic blog posts can reinforce some keywords or add others, giving your website added strength when it comes to attracting new visitors. Newsletters can’t do that.
- If your company does decide to do both a blog and a newsletter, each must include different information.
Blogs Are Better
According to Penn State University, a blog is a much more reader-friendly communication tool than a newsletter. A blog has more uses and is more likely to be read than a newsletter with multiple articles. But you don’t have to give up on your regular quarterly communications; just break it up into blog posts and put them on your website. The benefits are obvious.
Smarter Newsletters
If some of your clients still prefer to get a hard copy they can hold in their hands, you don’t have to get rid of your newsletter. Just be smarter about how you spend your writing and formatting time. First, ask your customers to opt in for a printed version to cut down on postage for your snail-mailing list. Then put together four or five of your best blog posts into a newsletter format and print it out for them. It’s a win-win situation.
At Ray Access, we’ll gladly share more about our experiences with online blogging — and even do it for you if you’re too busy. We also can pull together content for your newsletter customers and give you crisp new copy on a regular basis for all your followers.
Ray Access is a content marketing firm that delivers targeted words to empower your business. Contact us about your specific project to receive a quote or discuss your needs. We write website copy, blog posts, e-newsletters and more. Everything we do is thoroughly researched, professionally edited and guaranteed original.