When most people see the term 'email marketing', they think of opt-in email promotions. You know, where you buy a product and click on the 'send me periodic mailings with news of related products and services from Brownlow's Online Emporium'. Then once a month you get a short email extolling the virtues of the new Brownlow XF7, and inviting you to 'sign-up for a free trial'. There are whole books on email marketing which only deal with this idea of promotional emails.
That's fine, of course, and this kind of email marketing has established itself as an effective direct marketing technique. The problem is when you apply this perception of email marketing to the other ways in which you might communicate with customers via email.
This is often the case with email newsletters. Many websites and businesses don't understand that email promotions focus on acquisition, while email newsletters focus on retention.
Email promotions seek to get the recipient to take an immediate action. The design and writing funnels the reader through a persuasive process which ends with a sale. And by sale, I don't just mean purchases, but also sign-ups, downloads, registrations, and other kinds of actions.
The keyword here is immediate. Promotional emails are generally short-term in nature (unless part of a sequenced campaign). If the recipient doesn't respond more or less immediately to the offer, then chances are that the value of the email is lost. It has little long-term impact or influence on the recipient.
Newsletters on the other hand are about building long-term relationships. They may, of course, include calls to action, but their primary goal is to strengthen the relationship between the customer or prospect and the publishing entity.
The objective is usually to induce actions in and over the long-term. Newsletters aim to make the recipient of a newsletter much more likely at some time in the future to take the kind of actions ultimately desired by the publisher, and take them again and again if possible (e.g. repeat purchases). Newsletters build long-term impact and influence.
Promotions focus on persuasion; newsletters on trust and loyalty. Promotions look for immediate returns; newsletters for long-term benefits. Promotions make an offer; newsletters offer value.
Confusing the two leads to all sorts of problems. Subscribers expecting a newsletter often find themselves receiving one-off promotions. Since their expectations aren't met, the response is low and unsubscribes high. The publisher then rejects the idea of a newsletter because 'it doesn't work'.
When you see companies bad-mouthing the email newsletter concept, it's nearly always because what they've actually been doing is selling customers on the idea of a newsletter, and delivering a promotion instead. Instead of giving subscribers valuable, trust-building content, free of overt sales pressure, they've been delivering advertisements.
It's expectations that are key here. It's not the idea of sending commercial messages that's wrong, just the failure to meet the readership's expectations. Sending promotional emails to newsletter subscribers is much less effective then sending newsletters to newsletter subscribers, or sending promotional mails to those who opted in specifically for such promotions.
So if you're planning regular mailings to customers or prospects, make sure you understand the distinction and design your mails (and the promotion of your list) accordingly. It's not a question of one form of email marketing being better than the other, just a question of meeting and beating the expectations of your subscribers.
Mark Brownlow is an email publishing expert and author of the Keeping the Key Report, a detailed guide on how to create effective email newsletters.
