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E-mail Newsletters or Blogs: Which One is Better?

By Debra Murphy
Vista Consulting

E-mail newsletters have value in businesses as they enable you to reach out to your clients and prospects with timely information that adds value to their daily activities. Blogs provide a similar capability but with more interactivity. So which one of these two information products is better for your business?

Just like every other marketing program, you have to assess the value of each of these venues based on your target audience. What works for one business may or may not work for another. Your prospects and clients may wish to get their information by e-mail, through a feed or by visiting your blog directly.

E-mail Newsletters – The Benefits

A good e-mail newsletter that you enjoy reading is a welcome addition to your inbox. The challenge is that most of us are receiving so many e-mails today that it is hard to find time to keep on top of it all. However, e-mail newsletters offer many benefits for marketing your business. Your newsletter:

• Helps people get to know you without ever meeting you. It should reflect your personality and help you build your reputation in your field.
• Caters to your target market and helps you meet your marketing goals.
• Has a purpose such as driving traffic to your Web site or blog, building credibility for your services, generating demand for your products or services, announcing news and events about your company, or creating a community for your readers by providing information that you don’t post elsewhere.
• Is familiar and easy for most to use. You are not asking them to do something new such as visit your blog or subscribe to a news feed. It can also be personalized so that you can intimately connect with your readership.
• Gets delivered to their inbox. There really is no effort they need to do other than open it and read the content.

Blogs – The Benefits

An active, interesting blog can also benefit your business. Blogs benefit both the reader and the author. For the reader, blogs:

• Encourage them to interact with you. Your readers can comment on information you have provided, give their opinions of what you have written, both good and bad, and become part of your community.
• Give the reader a choice of how they want to receive and view the information. They can visit directly or subscribe via a syndicated news feed. Today, it is even easier to get the news you want because Internet Explorer and Firefox browsers now contain RSS readers that are easy to use. If there was ever a reason to upgrade to Internet Explorer 7, now is the time. The simplicity of subscribing to a feed from a blog makes it appealing to even the most technically phobic user.

From the author’s perspective, a blog:

• Enables you to communicate with your readers more easily. Your blog should be short snippets of information that discuss topics of interest to your subscribers.
• Can be created and updated using simple tools like WordPress and TypePad. These are content authoring tools that let you add content easily once the look and feel is developed or taken from their abundance of themes.
• Achieves higher rankings in the search engines quicker than Web sites because blogs are active, have links to other blogs and content is published regularly.

E-mail Newsletters and Blogs

Web 2.0 technologies have provided marketers more ways to get their messages to their target audience. With all these choices, it is more important than ever to develop an integrated marketing plan to ensure your strategy is aligned. Be sure that when you decide to launch your blog that you understand how all of your marketing efforts interact and that your readers get what they need from your content, regardless of whether it is coming from an e-mail newsletter or a blog. If your marketing plan addresses all of the venues you have available to reach your prospects and customers as a whole, you will be able to more easily reach those who are interested in what you have to offer.

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Debra Murphy is a marketing consultant for Vista Consulting with a background in computer science, management and marketing. With more than 20 years experience in marketing, her specialty is strategic consulting and management of focused marketing programs, ensuring businesses reach their ideal target market. She is also a contributing author to "Create the Business Breakthrough You Want: Secrets and Strategies from the World's Greatest Mentors."