2010 November | SendBlaster Blog

Each week, several dozen promotional emails pass through my filters and land in the various folders I’ve prepared to receive them. Some are long and some are short. Some are ignored and some are read. Some are clicked and some aren’t. They all want me to buy but they do it in different ways.

Or rather, those dozens of different emails want me to buy in just two different ways: sooner or later.

Some want me to buy immediately. They provide a quick announcement of a discount or a special offer. The emails tend to be small, digestible at a glance and have a single, clear call to action.

Disposable Email Flyers

They’re email flyers, as simple and disposable as the bits of paper that students hand out to passers-by on any commercial street. If I needed the product anyway, then I’d probably grab the opportunity to buy from that seller and at that price. If I wasn’t already considering a purchase though, then a glance at a simple email — like a quick look at a paper flyer — will struggle to create enough desire to make the sale. I’ve usually forgotten about the email five minutes after I’ve looked at it.

Continue reading ‘The Difference Between Email Marketing and Electronic Newsletters’

Newsletters often come packed with a number of different kinds of content. By mixing up the articles — offering one section about a new product, giving a discount away in another, and discussing usage tips in a third before ending with a call to action — you increase the chances that a reader will find something interesting in at least one of the sections. You give them at least one reason to read and click.

Those sorts of newsletters can be very effective, and very standard, but they carry a risk. Because readers know that only a small part of the newsletter will be of interest to them, there’s always the chance that they’ll skim it instead of reading it. They may shoot right past the section they would have found interesting, or they could even ignore your newsletter entirely, believing that most of its content isn’t really aimed at them.

The alternative is to send a newsletter about just one subject. While there’s always a chance that the subscribers will see the headline and ignore it, in practice, single-subject newsletters tend to look important enough for subscribers not just to see them but to read them carefully. The impression is of a break from normal service, an announcement important enough to warrant extra attention.

Continue reading ‘When — and How — to Use Single-Subject Newsletters’