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eNewsletter concept proves challenging for many small businesses
Few get their heads around how eNewsletters can really work for them

Regular readers of this blog will be familiar with my enthusiasm for eNewsletters.

I’ve waxed lyrical about the amazing capabilities of a good eNewsletter many a time.  And surveys of marketing professionals continue to report an amazing Return on Investment for those who do manage to get it right.

The reason they are so effective is because they are cheap to create and distribute and because they lend themselves to a high ‘viral’ (forward to others) factor.

A famous survey of US marketing professionals stated that the ROI from email marketing is a staggering 4500% or a $45 return for every dollar spent.

Low adoption by smaller business
But despite the encouragement of this blog and those of a number of other ‘e’vangelists, few smaller businesses in this country have been able to execute this proven direct marketing method effectively.

And of those who do attempt it, many persist with the outdated and essentially ineffective method of distributing a pdf via their Outlook. 

While they should be applauded for at least having a crack at the technique, this method fails to utilise the medium to its full interactive and viral potential.  What’s more, a large percentage of pdfs don’t even make it through their customers email filters.

One of the biggest obstacles for many in small business is grasping the notion of producing regular business and product information.  Even if they do, slotting in the necessary time to make it work proves beyond the vast majority of small business marketers.

‘Single story’ concept fails to strike a chord
The other difficulty many struggle with is the notion of adding individual news items to their websites.

Even though traditional newsletters are comprised of a number of individual ‘stories’, few are able to move their thinking away from this ‘assembled’ concept to the ‘single story’ concept that keeps websites fresh and attract search engine ‘bots’ more regularly.

This is illustrated by the considerable number of websites that simply store their news as individual pdf newsletters on their websites. 

While this approach is still better than nothing at all, it still proves that their webmasters are either being lazy or are failing to grasp the internet as a medium in its own right instead of a storage facility.

So how does the time and resource poor small business operator get close to the holy grail of effective eNewsletters?

Here’s a few ideas.

1 – Get the right tools
To do the eNews thing correctly its important that you have critical automation tools like:

• A Spam Act compliant email marketing system integrated with a Customer Relationship Management system – ideally both integrated with your website
• an automated news tool that automatically brings your article headlines and images to the front page of your website
• a facility to entice website visitors to sign up to your eNewsletter

These tools are now quite affordable to even the smallest of businesses.

2 – Create a regular and robust news gathering procedure
Come up with procedures to ensure a steady stream of interesting (newsworthy) content builds over the course of the week / month / quarter so that you have plenty to choose from when its time to publish.  Better still, edit and publish the item to your website as soon as you can so as to keep your site fresh and search engine bots returning

3 – Repurpose your news content for Blogs and other Social Networks
One article can form the basis to both a website item and an eNewsletter item.  But it can gain further lives by adding it to a blog and then tweeting about its availability.

The great news is that there are such low barriers to producing an effective eNewsletter, you can happily trial and error till you get some good results.

But if in doubt, consulting a professional may both save some heartache and lead to a faster ROI.