Marketing Sherpa’s Sergio Balegno believes that social media does not endanger email marketing. I wonder if he’s right.
There was a time when the only way to read informative articles was to subscribe to the publisher’s newsletter. That’s how they grew their list of interested prospects to market to.
Recently we’ve noticed that things seem to be changing.
In addition to the ‘traditional’ Email Newsletter (or Ezine), there are so many different routes to get your article out there – you can blog it (to your blog and as a guest post on other people’s blogs), submit it to article directories, post on forums, tweet it and even Squidoo it.
In theory this is great because using social media helps to quickly increase the visibility of your articles, but it also puts pressure on you as a writer to keep producing more and more new content. And as it’s a way of show-casing your expertise, it has to be high quality content too!
Now, Sam and I take pride in providing original fresh content, both in our individual newsletters (Marketing Karma and Competitive Advantage) and in our excellent jointly authored Savvy Marketing Tips (hint, hint!). We truly value our subscribers and want them to keep reading, even though it’s sometimes hard for us to fit in all the writing.
As suggested in a previous post, it’s acceptable practice to use articles more than once, after a decent time interval. However, this is what some people are doing:
They are writing an article, posting it on their blog, submitting it to directories, tweeting it and sending it out in their newsletter – all in the space of a few days!
Here’s the point. I can get the same article on my blog reader sometimes before the email newsletter even reaches my inbox. If the main difference is that the newsletter also contains promotions ….. you can guess which one I prefer to subscribe to.
Email Newsletter publishers are going to have to re-think their article distribution strategy if they want to keep their subscribers reading.
{ 3 comments… read them below or add one }
Thank you found your article very helpful and have subscribed to your blog by e-mail. Our blog is http://www.uk-fertility.co.uk
Hi Louise, I think ‘the end for email marketing’ is a bit sweeping, even though as an email marketer I’m probably biased! What you’re describing is a very small niche both in terms of the type of email newsletter and the readership.
The vast majority of folks who either produce or subscribe to email newsletters (including small businesses) are not reading or writing blogs, not Tweeting, and have probably never heard of Squidoo. And I can’t see Amazon or M & S abandoning their email marketing just yet! Even for myself, I see my own email newsletter as having a different audience to my blog, even though there is some overlap.
I think the thing to do before abandoning email is to define who your audience is and find out how they prefer to get their information. People like you and I inhabit this rarefied world of online marketing, and if that’s where our audience is then yes, maybe email isn’t the best content distribution strategy. But it’s sometimes easy to forget just how far removed we are from the average small business owner, and certainly the ‘man in the street’.
Thanks for the post, I may well take up the theme on my own blog, as it’s an interesting idea.
Hi Robin, thanks for your comment. I’m with you and also find email marketing very effective. You raise some valid points about the ‘rarified online world’ we inhabit. I suppose what I’m really trying to say is that we do still need to be producing fresh content and not just relying on the automated services to do the work for us.
Time will tell!