How (too) frequent and (too) long are your newsletters?
Nurturing with newsletters
Newsletters have been praised as the most cost effective method to keep contact with your current and potential customers. This is nurturing your customers with newsletters.
Thus every month or on a regular basis companies try to get your attention by sending you their all important newsletter.
All companies try to sign you up or cheat you in to receive a newsletter from them.
The fivefold newsletter problem
- The abundance of newsletters in the email inbox: all companies think they are important for you.
- The length of the newsletters: too long and the messages are ignored
- The news worthiness: not all companies have real news worth reading every month.
- The images: the planned impact of images misses as many email clients block the download of images.
- The real news message can be lost: the real news is hidden by all the preceding marketing messages.
The two last ones might be the worst cases:
- No images makes the newsletter without content: thus no message.
- due to the fact the customer or potential customer has received already so many newsletters from the company with little interesting content, by the time important news is communicated, hardly anybody will notice and read it.
The promoters of newsletter nurturing will stipulate that your subscribers can unsubscribe easily with every newsletter received. However as people are lazy, it is much simpler for them to just skip or to hit the delete button for every newsletter message.
Still a good newsletter service should provide you with the number of opens.
Keep them hungry: Less is more
Thus if you use newsletters for nurturing purposes, don’t over-nurture your customers as they will become fed up of your content.
Make them stay slim and hungry with short newsletters and few containing interesting content.
Then you will stand a chance to be able to communicate the real news and to nurture when it really matters. Thus keep them hungry for real news.
Only speak out when it is important – as silence is golden too.
How many email newsletters does your company send out?
Any worth reading?
Any customer wins thanks to the newsletters?
