Promotion Or Newsletter? Know The Difference

At present, email marketing is still rather deeply rooted in most people as promotion or sales based. Most of our own clients (end marketeers, not Blink Campaign users) would send out a promotional email once or twice a month, getting their recipients to sign-up for something, introduce their new products or spread word about a great sale coming up.

This sort of direct marketing has already established itself as an effective method of marketing. In fact, its so deeply rooted that we've noticed many people use the same lingo/tone/impression/content in general with their email newsletters.

Email promotions focus on ACQUISITION, email newsletters focus on RETENTION.

Promotional based email's primary goal is for the recipient to click on the call-to-action. Taking a cue from Google Analytics, the email is designed and laid out to "funnel" the recipient through a persuasive process, giving the final push at the call-to-action. Even the copy is written solely for this purpose. The end "goal" would be either to register/participate in something (survey, contents, etc), download, go to the product page on the website, and anything else under the sun that prompts the recipient to take some immediate action. As immediate action is required from the recipient, promotional emails are very short-term. If the recipient doesn't take the intended call-to-action, the entire value of the promotional email is lost.

On the flip side of the coin, we have the email newsletter. Email newsletters are there to build long-term customer relationships. Again, the keyword here is retention. Naturally, some email newsletter designs have calls-to-action by the side or bottom, similar to banners in webpages. However, the primary goal of the email newsletter is still to strengthen the B-to-C relationship.

Naturally, this is not done overnight or over a few campaigns. Through the email newsletter, the recipient is induced to take action in AND over a long-term. A recipient who has been following closely may even be further induced to take actions again and again over time, such as repeat purchases. Email newsletters have the ability to build this sort of long-term impact and influence.

Comparison

Promotional Emails

• Persuasion
• Immediate action
• Make an offer

Emails newsletter

• Builds relationship, trust, loyalty
• Create long-term benefits
• Offer value

The importance of defining the difference

Mish-mashing both your promotions and your newsletter could be detrimental to your online marketing efforts. Is you've had low click-opens or high unsubscribes, perhaps its time to relook into your definitions. Subscribers who have signed up for a newsletter may have ended up being on the receiving end of one-off promotions. For agencies, it is especially important to advise your client accordingly or they may just drop the idea of an email newsletter because "it doesn't work" to them, based on the statistics of your campaigns.

For a recipient who've signed up for a newsletter, but ending in receiving more promotion EDMs than anything else, destroys the trust placed in the company by them providing their email address. Instead of giving subscribers valuable, trust-building content, free of overt sales pressure, they've been delivering advertisements.

As with all things in life and business, setting the right expectations is key. There's no wrong in sending promotional mailers. But sending promotional messages to someone who've signed up for a newsletter is far less effective than sending newsletters to newsletter subscribers. Or promotional mailers to subscribers who've opted in specifically to further receive promotions on top of their newsletters.

So if you're planning on regular campaigns for your clients, understand the distinction and design your mails and campaigns accordingly. Do not be mistaken that one form is better over the other. Its simply a matter of setting, meeting and exceeding the expectations of the recipients.