Weekly Bulletin February 2012
Marketeers have always tried to maximise the effectiveness of customer communication and the newsletter was an extremely useful tool. Unfortunately, in these busy times newsletters and e-newsletters are becoming obsolete: E-Bulletins are the way forward!
Back in the day, before the advent of e-newsletters, traditional newsletters and communications bulletins were paper based and had to be posted to recipients or distributed by sales teams on their calls. Newsletters were usually in A4 format and mainly contained four pages, featuring around 6-10 articles.
When e-newsletters advanced from just being a PDF version of the traditional edition, they developed into being 5 or 6 articles, each with a short introductory paragraph and hyperlinks to more detailed articles on the Company's website.
These days, with overloaded inboxes, everyone is far too busy to read this format of email. Even for those emails where you've taken the decision to ‘opt-in', the email is only granted a very short review time, often in the Outlook ‘Preview' pane. As a result, most of the e-newsletter content ‘below the fold' is simply ignored. The solution is to develop an effective system of ‘e-Bulletin', each containing only one article.
It is absolutely essential that your e-Bulletin has a strong email title – without it your email will fall by the wayside with a poor ‘open' rate. The title “December Newsletter” does not inspire anyone so make it snappy and succinct! Your potential readers speed-read the title and eyeball the preview pane – making an instant judgement and then hopefully clicking on a hyperlink.
Follow these few hints and tips on how to engage with your email's recipients:
- Instead of one monthly e-newsletter with four articles send four weekly e-Bulletins
- Feature just one item in each e-Bulletin, giving it a powerful engaging title
- Pursue the technique of including a brief introduction within the email and a hyperlink to a longer article on the website. Keep the complete article under 450 words
- The recipient will continue their speed read and eyeball technique but nothing is missed
- This approach is FOUR TIMES more likely to achieve engagement with your reader
- You will have a true measure of the popularity of the topics you're communicating (by not diluting messages or featuring too many subjects)
On reading this bulletin, you may already be thinking about how you can better manage your outbound communications. For help in developing techniques to win more leads and build an effective e-marketing plan, contact Terry Forsey for a no obligation discussion on 01536 771440 or click on www.terryforsey.com.
