Why Newsletters Should be Part of Your Marketing Strategy
Remember the story of the shoemaker’s children who had no shoes? Well, we here at Westamerica Communications have taken that story to heart and are about to do something we haven’t done for a while. We’re publishing a print newsletter.
We’ve created company newsletters for a wide variety of clients. We design and print newsletters all the time, just not for ourselves. So, why now?
Digital Marketing vs Traditional Marketing Statistics
We do quite a bit of marketing for our company. We write and publish blogs on social media and on our website. We send email blasts. We attend trade shows and sponsor community events.
Recently, we took some time to examine our marketing efforts and noticed that many of our efforts are ephemeral.
A post on Facebook virtually disappears as a follower scrolls through their feed. And emails seem to disappear in a flood of inbox communications. In 2015, the average office worker received 122 emails a day. I’m sure it’s even more today.
Then there’s the open and click-through rate of online communications. The average click-through rate for Facebook Industrial Services ads is 0.71%. The average email open rate for the Marketing and Advertising Industry is 17.81%. And the click-through rate is 1.92%.
And, once opened, how much do people remember what they read online? There’s a large body of evidence that shows that recall is higher among individuals who are exposed to a printed ad, such as a direct mail piece, versus a digital ad.
One report I saw says that physical “Touch has the power to shift the brain into a deeper level of engagement, one more conducive to building lasting knowledge.” And, when it comes to recall, research shows a 3:1 advantage for print over digital.
With this knowledge in hand, we decided to add something to our marketing mix that would allow our clients to engage with our brand on a more physical level.
Direct Mail Marketing
The first thing to remember about a newsletter is that the United States Postal Service will deliver it. This adds a whole new dimension to the phrase “open rates.”
Research shows that “In a world of email, texts, and social media, 41% of Americans nevertheless look forward to checking what is in their mailbox each day.” And that includes 36% of millennials who also feel this way.
When compared with online marketing, direct mail marketing is the “king” of open rates. Take a minute and think of how you “open” your mail.
Every day you go to your mailbox, like millions of other people. You open the box and remove the stack of mail. You may do as I do. There’s one stack for bills, one stack for “I’ll read it now,” one stack for “I’ll read it later,” and one stack for the recycle bin.
Notice, whichever stack the mail was placed on, I had to look, touch, and read every single piece of mail. I may not have read through every piece of mail but I did read enough to know which stack to place it on.
The quality of the newsletter’s design, images, and paper will determine on to which stack it will be placed.
Don’t just take my word for it. Kim Walsh Phillips, Founder and CEO of Elite Digital Group, says print newsletters are “the secret weapon in your social media marketing arsenal.”
“My business empire has been built with print newsletters as its foundation and a centerpiece around which everything else orbits. Well over 50% of my high-value private clients rise up out of the newsletter subscriber base — it would cost me a fortune to find them otherwise.” – Kim Walsh Phillips
Now keep in mind, Phillips runs a company that helps other companies with their onlinemarketing and she uses print newsletters to grow her own company.
Her article in Entrepreneur makes some great points about the benefits of a print newsletter. She also talks about creating an effective newsletter. I encourage you to read her article.
At Westamerica we understand that, when it comes to marketing, it’s not “either or” it’s both. We will continue using online marketing as part of our awareness campaigns in addition to our company newsletter. In fact, we are repurposing some of our online material by using it in our newsletter. In addition, we’ll link to our online materials from our offline products. We’ll do this because the marketing universe is huge and we want to reach our current and prospective clients where they live, work and play.
If you’d like to check out our newsletter, send an email to Mail@mywestamerica.com and I’ll get one out to you.