Are Email Newsletters Even Viable Anymore?
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The only digital communication medium that’s been with us from the very beginning and still widely in use today is email. (Discussion boards are second.) And every few years we’re told that we need to move on from email newsletters. And that advice has always been wrong.
Goal: Get Famous, However You Can
But first the bigger context. Marketing your firm is essentially nothing more than being well known by the right people for the right things. That’s all you need to keep dropping opportunity into the top of the funnel, and while I’m going to talk about email in just a moment, I want to take a quick detour, first, and expand that thought.
There are many very successful firms who depend almost exclusively on outbound LinkedIn or networking at events or cold calling or digital ads or social media or whatever else, and I don’t want to demean those methods at all. When I get to the “lead generation” module in my work with a client, I try to consider these things when suggesting how they find clients:
- Personality of the principal. (Yes, the principal should be heavily involved). This is also where we might see who else could help in the firm’s new business efforts.
- Nature of their focus or specialization because each vertical or horizontal has unique “water fountains” where and how people gather. Higher ed still uses trade shows, if you can believe that.
- Do they have more time or money to pull this off.
- What assets do they already have.
I often daydream about the most effective and efficient marketing plan I could imagine, and it’s probably a massively popular book, however unremarkable it is (hello Jeffrey Gitomer) combined with a TED talk that goes viral (that’s really how we first heard of Brené Brown).
Why Email Leads All The Options
While there are many ways to fill the funnel, what’s particularly unique about an email newsletter?
- You own it and can’t be deplatformed. You aren’t subject to changes in an algorithm, the sudden changes in what a platform allows or how they serve up an audience to your little ol’ self, etc. There are a bunch of reasons in this list, but nothing comes close to this one. Yeah, someone can kick you off their ESP, but you can just find another one. (Do not use Medium, ever. They own the SEO juice.)
- There’s an expected response path. If something strikes me while listening to a podcast episode, I don’t have a direct route to engaging the author, but I can easily just hit “reply” and have a conversation with a newsletter author (try it, by the way, and one of us will answer).
- Email provides an excellent feedback loop. Some of the available stats are kind of meaningless, but the net growth of your list and keeping the unsubscribe rate below 0.25% with each send will answer most of your questions about relevance. And then you can construct your own dashboard to track every conceivable thing that you find interesting.
- Everybody uses the medium. There really are no exceptions to this. Not everybody is active on LinkedIn or follows you on Instagram or responds to a combined SEO/SEM spend, but every single person on earth who might hire you has an email address.
- Cost-Effective. The cost is so minimal that it’s trivial. It’s just dirt cheap, and the cost gets cheaper and cheaper per record as your list grows.
- Re-Engagement. If someone quits reading or responding, just park them in a “later” closet and re-engage in a year.
- It can be personalized. This depends on a pretty consistent implementation of a progressive profiling scheme, and you have to be careful to not overdo it, but even if you don’t use variable fields, you can segment your list.
- Scalability. I’m referring to certain outreach methods, and this is one that’s clearly scalable whereas some others are not. See this earlier article on which methods fall in this category.
Critical Components Of An Email Strategy
But let’s say that you’re convinced that an email newsletter is right for you. How should you think about it?
- Don’t include much “news” in your newsletter. Your clients might care about a new hire (doubtful), but your prospects definitely don’t. That’s true for your awards and your case-studies, too.
- Do include usable insight that pays off your positioning. The idea is that you should be able to write things that make the reader feel like you have a camera planted in their office. No useless articles on “how to choose a dev shop” or other self-serving topics.
- Cut off a sliver and dive really deep. That demonstrates how much substance is behind your strategic guidance, while also delivering on your generosity in offering it. That’s far superior to skating across all kinds of topics without leaving any evidence of how deep you can go. Pick a small thing and go deep and they’ll assume that you can go deep on the others that you aren’t publicly addressing.
- Aim for a POV that’s so thoughtful that it either makes someone stop and think…and then maybe forward it to a colleague, or unsubscribe because they don’t see the relevance.
- Your relationship with your readers is the first thing you’d grab if you had to flee a burning building. While I know that wouldn’t be necessary, it makes the point about how important it is. Always have the long view.
Jumpstarting Your Efforts
Now, if I haven’t pissed off you purists yet, this should do the trick. I think—under certain circumstances—that it’s totally acceptable to purchase a list, but only if you follow these steps:
- Tightly targeted. If you work with auto dealers, only get email addresses of the advertising manager of that enterprise.
- Clean the list. I like Webbula, but there are many options.
- Include brilliant, imminently useful insights. Duh.
- No selling. And I mean that. No selling.
- No announcing: “Hey, here’s why you’re getting this newsletter out of the blue…”
If you’re still nervous, use a different provider and then import it to your main sending platform. Still don’t believe me that this is effective and acceptable? Here’s a recent example a client performed:
- 4,000 names and email addresses from Linkedin Sales Navigator.
- 10 hard bounces.
- 11 unsubscribes.
- Healthy (and rising) open and CTR.
- No spam complaints. Not a single one.
How A Real Authority Thinks About This
You don’t need to take my word for it. Rand Fishkin took a deep dive into email effectiveness, especially for you as an agency, compared to the other mediums you might be using, and said this:
If you’re not investing in an email list, you’re almost certainly missing out. That TikTok/ Instagram/ Threads/ Twitter/ LinkedIn following you’re building? Statistically it’s better to trade 1,000 new followers for a single email subscriber. That’s how lopsided the value-exchange is.
His reasoning, after polling the sources:
Social media engagement rates have plummeted the last 15 years. Ad engagement, too. Google CTRs have fallen massively the last decade with the rise of zero-click searches. The visibility of TV and print advertisements have died off with those mediums. There are tiny exceptions to these (televised sports, some print magazines, podcast advertising, etc.). But, by and large, every marketing channel that’s risen in the last quarter century has fallen in efficacy the last decade. Except email…. Email, thanks to its independence from monopoly-power and the inevitable enshittification their incentives demand, is the channel that never dies.
Regardless, please don’t write or dismiss email as a medium that’s strong now…and will be into the indefinite future. You know what’s also cool? Firms who are combining email with traditional direct mail, which doesn’t have the privacy concerns and stands out because it’s unusual.
Email isn’t the only way to solve your new business challenge, but it should be one of your top options. You and tens of thousands of others are reading this, by the way!
Here are some more articles if you’d like to explore this in greater depth:
- Why You Might Want To Leave Your Content Ungated.
- Why No One Wants To Read Your Newsletters.
- An interview I gave to Dan Oshinsky, the former director of newsletters at The New Yorker and Buzzfeed, before that.