Email Newsletters Still Alive and Very Well

Sam Harrelson on July 8, 2014

For Email Newsletters, a Death Greatly Exaggerated - NYTimes.com

Email newsletters seem like such a quaint and out-of-date form of marketing, but they are incredibly effective because 1) people still rely on email more than most anything else for relevant info and 2) email has a personal connection in the same way our phones once did.

That doesn’t mean that blasting out emails with no relevancy or context is a successful strategy. Like anything else in the world of marketing, connection matters most.

The NY Times agrees…

With an email, there is a presumption of connection, of something personal, that makes it a good platform for publishers. Newer email newsletter outfits like TinyLetter, which MailChimp owns, are simple, free and easy to use. TinyLetter has over 100,000 users who reach 9.3 million subscribers, and it has had an increase of 15 percent in the number of newsletters sent in the last year.

via For Email Newsletters, a Death Greatly Exaggerated – NYTimes.com.

We’re big fans of MailChimp at Harrelson Agency and use their services for a number of our clients. If you want to get your start with email newsletters, they are a good place to start (and understand the power of mobile!).

 

You Need to Segment Your Email List

Sam Harrelson on July 3, 2014

Building an email newsletter is a fantastic thing for your business. In fact, it’s a must. Email is still a very active and viable channel for marketing and with free/cheap tools such as MailChimp, Constant Contact or Awebber, it’s easier than ever to organize and send email newsletters.

Whether your list size is 50 or 5,000, you need to be segmenting your list. That means splitting it up into various sub-lists based on relevance and groupings.

Even with small business lists of only 50 addresses, we commonly segment those into “leads,” “potential leads,” and “previous customers” with each segment receiving their own variation of the newsletter.

It works.

And here’s some data to back me up…

When I conducted a survey about email marketing, I asked respondents to tell me, in a free-form text field, why they chose to subscribe to emails from some companies. One of the most common responses I received was that they expected the emails were going to be relevant to their interests. 38% of respondents specifically referenced the word “relevance,” and one especially well-worded response indicated that content should be “particularly and specifically” relevant to them.

via New Data Proves Why You Need to Segment Your Email Marketing.