Lyric’s Marketing Tip #24: You Just Thought This Marketing Tool Was Dead

Today’s morning walk was invigorating and I was totally inspired by the cooler early morning weather. I’m thinking about “trends” in marketing – what I, what YOU, need to get your message out and read. There are so many choices, but I always land back at content newsletters and emails.  Yep, the old-school stuff that we thought would go away, yet, these tools remain the best way to reach people with a personal message (just saying, I’ve been preaching this for years!) You just THOUGHT this marketing tool was dead, or passé. 

I don’t know why. Maybe because I have been working for a long time in marketing and advertising, but it seems like we always go back to old-school methods. Example: Running, there’s nothing that burns fat off better than a challenging and sweaty jog (run, power walk) three or four times a week.  Do we do it? Most of us will look for and resort to “easier” programs or routines that we think will be more effective with less effort. That doesn’t work most of the time . To be fit and healthy, it’s simple, you have to eat right and exercise.  There’s no chemical tricks, and there’s no mechanical movement that can make it happen for you.  (Bear with me for a minute!) You simply have to move your body so you burn more calories than you consume, right?  We’ve done this in marketing, can you see the correlation?  We have dumped personalized marketing for the quick fix.  It’s getting old, tired, boring.  No one wants to read it and they are not listening!  What happens?  No real marketing gets done.  So, the tip I want to give you this week is this: The old-school marketing method that the pros predicted a few years ago would be buried is in fact “on the rise”.  People want real information that pertains to THEM, and they want YOU to give it to them. Email newsletters with great content are still preferred, and they work!  

A New York Times article that ran this week said that emails and email newsletters are coming back with a vengeance. Why? Because personal messages need to be delivered personally. I hope you enjoy Lyric’s Tip this week, and remember, marketing is like great exercise, to get results, you can’t be lazy with it. 

Lyric’s Marketing Tip #24: You Just Thought This Marketing Tool Was Dead

From the NYT article ” For Email Newsletters, a Death Greatly Exaggerated” by David Carr:  “Newsletters are clicking because readers have grown tired of the endless stream of information on the Internet, and having something finite and recognizable show up in your inbox can impose order on all that chaos. In fact, the comeback of email newsletters has been covered in Fast Company, The Atlantic and Medium, but I missed those articles because, really, who can keep up with a never-ending scroll of new developments? That’s where email newsletters, with their aggregation and summaries, come in. Some are email only, others reprise something that can be found on the web. At a time when lots of news and information is whizzing by online, email newsletters — some free, some not — help us figure out what’s worth paying attention to.”

I couldn’t have said it any better!

I have created the infographic pictured above, “The Making of a Newsletter”, click on the image to download it.  The bullet points in the infographic cover the simple strategic elements you will need to employ when creating your newsletter.  I’ve said it before and I will say it again, a generic, impersonal and automated newsletter or email campaign is not effective, it’s spam.  To be effective it must represent YOUR voice, reflect your personality, opinion, and expertise, after all, that’s what you’re selling isn’t it?  This is your vehicle to drive your passionate message about your company to your audience.  It is a performance, delivered electronically, and it needs to be authentic and genuine and personal.

A great email newsletter (in any form – email blast, plain text, or a smartly designed HTML page) that sorts through the noise and delivers carefully written and compelling information pertaining to your industry, product, and/or brand, is, in my opinion, one of the best forms of marketing we have. Download my FREE white paper “The Making of a Newsletter” here.