Newsletter Definition:
The newsletter is a well-crafted informational report to deliver something valuable about your business in terms of the addressee to the recipient. Its content depends on goals – whether it is to send updates, to present a new product, to ask for feedback or to stay in touch. It is commonly used for repeating website purchases, for increasing awareness and for promoting discount offers.
The newsletter is a tool for getting to know customer demands and preferences, for making them feel like they are participating in your project, and planning the way you handle your further business processes.
What is the purpose of a newsletter?
Newsletters are often used by people who have websites, blogs, or e-commerce to advertise a product, content, article, communicate an event, or engage in remarketing campaigns, such as the abandoned cart — not forgetting the typical transactional communication (order confirmation, sending, etc.).
Speaking more globally, the newsletter has the following purpose:
- Maintain a Regular Contact
- That your website or blog does not fall into oblivion
- Increase Visitors, Encourage Visitors to Visit
- Send Different Types of Content to Relevant
- Create Visiting Habits
- Attract Traffic.
Newsletter alternatives – Reasons for finding
Nothing lasts forever; our world is changeable and marketing can be a pushover. That doesn’t mean you should start spring cleaning and throw the traditional tools away. Some of them can be improved or added to. The others need a total transformation, and some tools should become secondary… So, let’s look through the online newsletters’ downsides in terms of modern trends, and see the necessity of email newsletter alternatives:
- After you’ve sent the email newsletter, you must settle in and wait for the addressee to ignore or open. It’s out of your hands now. It’s not like social media where users have to respond back via comments, shares and links to your sites from their own online resources.
- If the recipient wants to share the newsletter, they can send it to his close friend or to someone who could be interested in this. However, it will be one or two persons. People in social networks share with thousands of users.
- You can hardly support a conversation via emails, but messengers make it easy and fruitful.
- People consider their email boxes something very personal and private. That’s why they perceive newsletters to be rather aggressive sometimes. They can complain about spam or write you their immense indignation.
Here, nobody asks to forget about the newsletters, but to understand their flaws and to select the more profitable alternatives for certain types of promotion. For example, newsletters are very helpful for thanking or greeting your customers. Besides, you should think of newsletters for an “upgrade” or a “rebrand.”
The TOP email newsletter alternatives
Alternatives to the word newsletter are worth learning. However, it’s a piece of cake to destroy the old techniques, but difficult to invent new ones, isn’t it? Don’t rip out your hair. We have the entire thing figured out.
Single-topic emails
It happens to be the case that we try to pack all our products’ advantages, offers and triggers into one letter making it babbled. However, nobody is going to read an epic narration. The subject line should be single to cause the users’ interest. Don’t be afraid of limitations, because you are free to choose any topic, whether it’s a question or a request, an offer or a presentation. It’s a very crucial part of the newsletter etiquette.
The topic is not allowed being blurred or incomprehensible but expressive and meaningful. You may start it with a question or call-to-action. It could be a provoking statement or a piece of the body content. The main point is that the subject line should always be relevant to a body content. It may be amusing, funny, poetic or even shocking but always catchy and valid.
Here is the topic of Disney’s newsletter as a pattern: “Behind the Scenes: Waltzing through ‘Mickey’s Boo-To-You Halloween Parade.” It is eye-catching because everybody would like to get a view from the trenches, so to speak.
Blogging
Blogging is one of the most popular alternatives to email newsletters for now. It provides the usage of the storytelling – an efficient tool to grab your audience’s attention. Nevertheless, how does it compete with email marketing? This is the case when email newsletters don’t go away, but become the additional tool.
Create a blog with a subscription option. Only permit users via email to view new posts they are waiting rather than getting spam. Here you go, sir. There is no need to deliver the whole article. A short, but a very catchy preview, is enough to achieve tremendous engagement, if the reader’s profit is visible in this preview.
Here is Netflix’s announcement in a newsletter to their audience, based on their likes and viewing history: “Lee Daniels’ the Butler. The life of a White House butler who served under eight presidents unfolds against a backdrop of unparalleled change in American history. More info.” Then they placed two buttons to make the audience opt for adding it their list. Besides, they use personalization via adding the name of the addressee: “for Kyle.”
Social media
Social networks are alternatives to newsletter and are more effective than email marketing, if your main goal is to convey the message across as many recipients as possible as a means to share. More than half of the World’s content sharing actions happen via Facebook and near 20% of it occur via Twitter, and 5% belong to LinkedIn. Newsletters managed to reach only 4%.
Why it is so? It’s not an injustice, the thing is that social networks rely on user-contributed content first and online newsletters contain entirely editor-supplied content. It doesn’t deal with the conversion because it will certainly be lower because of the social platforms’ target market range of the thousands of users. That’s why we stress on sharing, but not direct advertising.
What content fits the social websites? It may be a video highlighting the uniqueness of your goods/services or heroic cartoons if you’re selling extreme tours.
For example, if you sell tours, it would be great to send a short video of the certain landmark and ask for giving it a creative title. The competition would be appropriate here.
Podcasts
While researching alternatives to sending newsletters, we could hardly miss podcasts. They are able to provide a thematic diversity and DIY-approach. The users listens to them on the metro and in rush hour traffic, they put a pause on them and come back to listening, and they share and discuss with others.
A podcast is a separate audio file or a regularly updated series of audio files to publish on the internet. They can be entertaining, informational or educational. They help expand the audience without any essential investments. People like them because they can listen to podcasts at their convenience, without a strictly regulated time.
For example, there is a podcast called The Growth Show for those who want to become a leading sales manager on the web. The topics deal with the company’s growth, development, team building, etc. Its host is HubSpot’s vice-president. This platform helps companies attract the audience and convert leads into customers.
Video channel
Video is a “must do” for every business. More than 80% of users’ content is published in video format. The most popular platforms for this purpose are social media, specifically YouTube. More than 1.5 billion people visit this platform every month with the average time of 40 minutes (!) a visit.
This alternative is the most fruitful for B2C, where the viewer is converted into the buyer very easily. Your own video channel allows you to present more positive and creative valid information, and makes your product more illustrative. It permits you to develop certain rubrics.
The most popular video channels deals with overviews, expert opinions, online education and live broadcasts. The 360-degree videos are on top. Besides, the vertical videos are adapted to mobile devices. Justin Bieber managed to collect 41.2 million subscribers on his channel and 5-Minute Crafts has 35.9 million ones.
Moreover, you can earn on your YouTube channel. Learn how the YouTube vloggers make money on their channels.
Targeted offer
It is one of the best alternatives to a newsletter, because you focus on individuals with specific features, but not on the average user. So, the exclusiveness becomes your joker. For example, United Airlines has oriented their business class tickets to an audience that consists of top-management with an income starting from $50,000 a month.
Your offer targets a key group of your audience, it’s a rather narrow segment. You send promotional messages and advertisements that are very specific. For example, Starbucks develops their marketing by taking the needs of young inhabitants of urban areas into consideration.
Testimonial
If you came to a point where you accepted that traditional and alternative newsletters should be combined, special software on the web helps with the email marketing implementation. Such services as Robly, iContact, etc. provide email-marketing customization, and outstanding newsletter design. They are integrated with CRM systems to ensure automation.
For example, Mailchimp is a versatile service that is user-friendly, even for rookies. It enables creating opt-in pages in a flash for a further promotion on social platforms. It is also perfect for sending your customers updates on a certain cycle. If you are interested in brand recognition, Constant Contact will meet your needs.
This list was brought to you by Adstuck which itself is an email campaign service provider.
Adstuck: Adstuck is a digital marketing practice agency working from all over the world with four locations India, Singapore, Estonia and US. Its mission is to provide instant access to a talented workforce to enterprise. They have 491 clients and worked over 700 projects, with 30 fortunes 500 firms.
Adstuck provide services in:
- Improving marketing results
- Creating social media marketing strategy
- Proper assessments of current trends
- Market research
- Campaign creation
- Growing market share
- Launching new product or enter new market.
It is a strong and leading digital media marketing service provider which can help you with cost cutting, plan execution, perfect reporting, strategy making, data collecting, and response collection from consumers. It handles all the aspects of your business. They don’t focus only on new on emerging brands who wants entail success and distribution in the market but also on brands that have successfully established the customer retail space, and need some assistance in managing their business.
