Spreading the word: online vs print

Are you producing your newsletter online? I can’t imagine why not. Stack the advantages of online newsletters against those of their country cousins (print) and online wins hands down. Consider this:

1. Calls to action

When your clients receive an online newsletter they can immediately and easily respond to calls to action through hyperlinks (such as mailto:debbie@successis. co.nz or www.successis.co.nz). With print they have to pick up a phone, fill out the form, post a letter or write and send a fax.

2. Referrals

Your clients can forward articles of interest from your electronic newsletters at the click of a button to their friends, colleagues and family members. And they can do it as often as they like. Print newsletters need to be talked about and physically handed over — who is going to go to that much trouble? And even if they do, there is only one copy to hand on. Online newsletters can be forwarded an infinite number of times.

3. Time

From the moment your online newsletter is finished, it is ready to distribute. Online newsletters are also easier to produce — often you use cut and paste and no graphics — thus making it quicker and more efficient to put together. Print newsletters need to be designed, prepared for print, printed and then posted — that’s both time-consuming and expensive.

4. Budget

Which brings us neatly to the next point — money. Online newsletters are far more cost effective to both produce and distribute. You do not spend a cent on stamps, printing or time folding pages and stuffing envelopes. Print newsletters require a significant budget to cover production, printing and distribution.

5. Distribution

Because of the extremely low cost, you can send online newsletters as often as you like and have a much wider distribution base than if you were printing and mailing. Personalisation software such as Worldmerge allows you to personalise each newsletter by any field in your database and only costs around $100. You can download a free trial from: www.coloradosoft.com

With print newsletters, you have to think carefully about who you send your newsletter to because growing your list means growing your costs. It’s difficult to personalise print newsletters unless you print different batches or leave room for printing names on later.

6. The Look

Here is the only relative disadvantage of electronic newsletters. They’re not glossy or pretty or as ‘graphic’ as print newsletters. But there are ways to overcome this obstacle.

a) Use html — it allows colour, text and formatting.

b) Link to a web site that hosts graphics — then you can cram the newsletter full of images. (Graphics can’t be embedded in an e-mail, they have to be linked.)

c) Good headlines and text with scan-ability.

A well done print newsletter can have superior visual appeal to an online newsletter — but you certainly pay for it.

7. Attention

E-mail gets looked at immediately, usually upon receipt. Most people will save online newsletters (if they consider them valuable) and print them out to read offline. It’s easier to ignore print newsletters, to put them away, or leave the envelope unopened.

8. Accessibility, size and speed

Let’s face it — anyone who is online has an e-mail program and so can receive newsletters either in html or plain text. And being online means receipt of the newsletter is instantaneous. Keep your newsletters at a low file size, around 50kb to 60kb, for speed and ease of download.

Print newsletters converted into Word or PDF files have several disadvantages.

The file sizes are usually unacceptably large, which annoy clients because of the time they take to download.

Clients may not open a newsletter if sent in Word for fear of viruses plus the incompatibility issue of Word 95 versus later issues.

Although Acrobat is available free at www.adobe.com, it is still not widely held by the general population. Then again — everyone has a mailbox, but not everyone has e-mail.

Let me share with you a few of my own online newsletter statistics to show you how powerful an interesting article or two could prove.

In August, my online newsletter had four e-mail marketing case studies in it. On January 20, 2003, I downloaded the following statistics from that newsletter (people are still reading it believe it or not!).

I sent out 4,980 full colour six-page (if you printed it out) newsletters. Of these, 54 had the wrong e-mail address and 259 bounced. If printed, I would have wasted 313 envelopes and postage. The newsletter went to a net 4,667 clients.

Here’s another great statistic: 9,944 different computers opened that e-mail, according to the data download. And yet I only sent it to 4,667 people. In other words, my online newsletter was forwarded to 5,277 people I didn’t know. How’s that for referrals?

On top of that, people went back to look at the newsletter again and again. In fact 25,596 times.

Being online also means I am able to tell what people clicked on within the newsletter. This way I can tell what articles are popular and how many went back to my web site. There’s nothing at all like this in print!

Debbie Mayo-Smith is a keynote speaker, consultant andauthor of Successful E-mail Marketing.