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Mike Donoghue is a member of a multinational information technology corporation where he collaborates on the communications guidelines and customer relationship strategies affecting the interactions with internal and external clients. He has analyzed, defined, designed and overseen processes for various engagements including product usability and customer satisfaction, best practice enterprise standardization, relationship/branding structures, and distribution effectiveness and direction. He has also established corporate library solutions to provide frameworks for sales, marketing, training, and support divisions.

  CRM   Stakeholder Management  

Print may not be dead, but it certainly is in a coma when it comes to sending newsletters. Sometimes called e-zines, e-mail delivered Web-based newsletters are certainly proving their worth, especially to small companies that have limited resources and even more limited budgets.

The cost effectiveness is certainly a strong reason to send material electronically instead of via postal means. A study in August 2002 found that the average cost at the time to market an e-mail message in the United States was 0.47 cents--contrasting with the 18 cents to send a letter bulk rate. And if some potential client is just going to throw it out after they've read it anyway, wouldn't you rather save the 17.53 cents for something else?

Hopefully, if you have a well-honed distribution list your spam-savvy subscribers have also learned how to distinguish your newsletters from unwanted e-mail, but they've also learned to delete them if they lack specific information and timeliness. Timely and specific newsletters are valuable assets--especially if the information being documented is itself time sensitive or provides an immediate impact to the reader. For those segments, instant transmission to focused, narrowcasting markets provide the most value.

So What's the Problem?
Some recent research studies that gathered data from a variety of online advertising …

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