Mainly Melissa!

This week Marketing Sherpa's chart featured why a large majority of people are unsubscribing to E-newsletters. This got me thinking about my own inbox. I regularly get Newsletters from eteamz and I'm not to sure how I got onto the e-mail list for eteamz. I suspect it was when I was in high school and experimented with making a team website for the cheer team I was on. It has been almost 5 years since I've last been involved in cheer, however I still get these e-mails informing me of the upcoming football season happening in Kentucky. Which actually I don't understand because I don't think I've ever expressed an interest in football. This mail usually goes into my spam box however once in a while it weasels its way into my inbox and I just automatically delete it. I can't even be bothered to open it and select unsubcribed because that just sounds like more work. To me this is junk mail. However, after reading the Marketing Sherpa case study on the use of 0E-Newsletters I see that the eteamz newsletters is not necessarily junk its just not very relevant to me. As the table shows another reason why people are deleting themselves of e-mail lists is because the company is sending them too many newsletters. I believe that Nordstroms is guilty of sending their customers too many updates on sales/new items/ trends. I get atleast 3 e-mails from Nordstrom each week informing me of different sales.

So what does this mean for businesses?
It doesn't mean that you should stop sending out E-Newsletters. In fact I believe E-Newsletters is something that can help small businesses create community and create some form of communication with its users. What it means that who you send your e-mails to has to be more narrowed down and limit the quanity of e-mails that are sent. When asking your users to opt in to recieve news letters perhaps create a forum that they can fill out which asks them who they are, where they are, what they would like to hear about, and how often they'd like to hear from you. (ex. weekly deals, or just monthly updates on season trends and upcoming events) This will help you customize your newsletter to fit with the user.

In additon to this if people are opting out of your newsletter perhaps it would be a good idea to ask why they are. It may be beacuse their situation has changed and they no longer need the newsletter. In this case perhaps asking them to give a suggestion as to who they currently know would benefit from the newsletters.

Marketing Sherpa Also suggests that to improve your E-Newsletters you should:

• Create a template for newsletter content - utilizing a table contents to
  
• creating multimedia which matches the theme of the newsletter in order to be able to go more into depth on certain subjects
• Test and experiment new ideas to see what works