Yes! Email newsletters can still be effective. 

Even with all the new ways we can communicate with one another digitally, email newsletters can still be a worthwhile investment for your company.  

Although email may seem like a dinosaur compared to its newer social media counterpart, but it’s still an incredibly popular form of communication. According to one study, 86 percent of professionals ranked email as their preferred mode of communication.

In another study, researchers found that by 2019 there will be 3.8 billion email users worldwide – and 4.2 billion by 2022.

Sure, these statistics don’t necessarily mean that all your customers are as into newsletters as they are into their Twitter or Instagram feeds – but email’s sustained popularity despite the rise of social media shouldn’t be ignored when trying to decide if email marketing is the right move for your organization. When done correctly, many companies benefit from implementing newsletters into their content marketing portfolio.

Successful implementation has never been easier considering all the different email marketing platforms available. MailChimp, ConstantContact and Drip, are just a few of the many options.

It’s important to find the right software for the right price, though; unlike social media, email newsletters usually aren’t free, and getting ROI on your newsletters can be difficult unless you’re indirectly selling products via your newsletter.

For clarity, examples of indirect selling include coupons, advertising current or upcoming sales, etc.

However, similar to social media features like Instagram Insights or Twitter Analytics, newsletter software takes care of the analytics, statistics, and trends that tell you what content is most effective – but the actual content is still up to you.

Sending out a newsletter requires the same main consideration as when sending out a regular email: you only send someone an email if you really have something to say. There are three important questions that you can ask to make sure your content is newsletter worthy.

Is it timely?

If your company launched an amazing new product in October 2017, that’s great! But that was more than a year ago. There has to be something that has happened with your company more recently. Did you merge with or buy a competing or complementary brand recently? Does your company have a new CFO?

If not, then maybe a newsletter isn’t the way to go for your company (at least not yet!)

Is it relevant (to whom you’re sending it to and to your company’s brand)?

An online clothing store wouldn’t send a newsletter about a men’s clothing sale to the customers that registered as female on their website. That would be like if PR Over Coffee suddenly started blogging about venture capitalism. While investing in emerging businesses is probably interesting to at least some of you, it’s not what you came here for! We advertised ourselves as PR focused, not finance focused.

A brand/content mismatch like this can hurt your credibility with customers and make them less likely to read your newsletters in the future – the opposite of what a newsletter should do.

How often do you have something to say?

Just like your favorite podcast usually posts on the same day every week, newsletters are usually sent on a fixed schedule so that your customers know when to look for it. Therefore, consider setting up a quarterly, monthly, or even weekly schedule for your newsletter. The schedule you decide on should depend on how often you have something meaningful to say to your subscribers.

This will help prevent it from getting lost in their inbox under a mountain of other newsletters (that they only get because they forgot to opt-out of subscribing at checkout when doing their holiday shopping last year).

In short, email newsletters can be a great addition to a company’s marketing mix. Nevertheless, there’s no point in investing in an email marketing software if you don’t have something relevant to share on a regular basis.

To make sure that you are putting your best foot forward, you may find it best to hire a great writer who specializes in content development. This will give you time to focus on doing content-worthy things in your company while still building awareness and support for your brand.

About Weslie Oeftering: Weslie is a student at The University of Texas at Austin and Swyft’s resident PR and marketing intern. She supports clients with social media, blogging, and tech PR activities. Swyft is a digital marketing agency in Denver with offices in Austin, Houston, and Antwerp that provides digital marketing services and trade show lead gen support for tech companies around the world. Some of their services include media relations, content and inbound marketing, CPC campaigns, and marketing automation consulting.