Email Newsletter versus Blog

Is It Time To Reignite Your Email And Swap Your Blog For A Newsletter

You have a website, you have social media channels, but what other ways can you continue a conversation with your customers. A shift in how content is being presented to your online audience is occurring and it mainly surrounds the blog versus email newsletter dilemma.

A number of bloggers and businesses around the world are refocusing their efforts towards delivering a well-crafted email newsletter to either replace, or supplement their blog. So do you choose between writing a weekly blog posy, and writing a weekly newsletter, or try to combine both into a communication system, which works for you.

Why should you write a newsletter?

The main benefit from writing a newsletter is that it can enhance the relationship you currently have with your existing viewers. Every time you compose a newsletter and distribute it to your community, you hit an audience immediately that is already interested in what you have to talk to about.

Newsletters are also a nice and gentle way of pushing your business on potential customers. When you write a blog post, you have to hope that it is seen and that people discover it. Obviously there is RSS and great RSS services such as feedly.com but let’s be honest, not many of us subscribe to RSS Feeds anymore.

If the general person is like me, then they will not remember to check someone’s blog each week, no matter how interesting they may find the blogger and the content. With a newsletter, you can set a target to reach an interested audience of 2000 people who care about the problems your business seeks to solve through the products or services you offer. Over time, this 2000 people can become a reality and every time you hit send, you will reach an interested audience.

A newsletter also generally takes less time than a blog and works a different angle of communication. If you are lucky enough to have a large list of engaged users, there are great benefits of being able to reach them directly without having them look through your articles one-by-one.

Why you cannot forget about a blog?

If you want to grow your business or the reach of your content, you need to write blogs. They are more sharable; people can easily share good blogs across social media channels such as Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn. My good mate, The Galway Player knows all about this as his business succeeds on social sharing and larger Irish examples such as Joe.ie and Her.ie are founded on this principle.

In SEO (Search Engine Optimization) terms, blog posts are excellent for building your website as they tie in with your SEO and social media, allowing you to develop a bigger audience as you progress. A newsletter, no matter how optimized, will not help you grow your ranking on Google.

Blog posts attract visitors to your website and gives people a reason to come back, especially if the content is deemed of enough value. Newsletters generally don’t help people come back to your website unless you have particular CTA’s (Call To Actions) that will drive them back.

The Solution to Blogging vs. Newsletters

Well, I’m afraid there are no obvious black and white answers here. We are well and truly in the grey. The best solution for you depends on a number of factors, including:

How many subscribers you already have to your newsletter The time you have each week to place in writing content for blogs The need you may have to bring new customers and readers. My personal opinion is that blog posts and email newsletters (marketing) should exist side by side. Blog posts allow you to attract new readers and keep existing readers interested. Then conversations can happen around this each week, which may lead to increased subscribers to your email. The newsletter allows you to create a personal aspect to your communication that can encourage people to communicate directly with you.

Your blog is your home for the content you create which has an open door policy for new and existing readers to engage and interact while the newsletter is the tea on the table that offers your email subscriber family that little extra personal touch that drives even more communication.