Microbusiness Mentor

An entrepreneur operates in a very small market (environmental consulting) and produces a virtual product (CD). There is some interest in the company’s website visitors for a newsletter.

The entrepreneur wonders which approach makes more sense when reaching customers: a blog or a newsletter?

I’ve used both newsletters and blogs in my business operations. I find that it is critical to understand your customer. This means understand not just the demographics, but the “psychology” of your customers (in competitive intelligence, we call this “psychographic profiling”).

How web savvy are your customers? Are your customers more comfortable receiving information through their inbox in the form of an email? Or do your customers go online or visit blogs when researching a purchasing decision?

My Recommendation: the Smaller the Market, the more Personal the Approach

When you are working in a small market, or niche/micro-niche market, I recommend that you produce a newsletter to engage each individual customer. I use a service that automatically addresses each subscriber by the first name they designate, so each newsletter will be personalized to the receiver. For example, a newsletter sent to me will open with, “Dear Jane” instead of “Hello!”

The drawback to creating a newsletter is that this takes more time to produce - from authoring content to creating the newsletter templates. It can even get pricey if you want to customize the template to integrate seamlessly with your brand (i.e. look like your business website, use the same colors, have your corporate logo) or offer a downloadable PDF.

Newsletter-Blog “Hybrid” Approach

You may want to consider a hybrid method, which I also use, and create newsletters that link to a particular website, or blog post. If you want to consider this approach, be careful not to make it “teaser only” (i.e. purely a sales pitch for a click on the link to your blog), and aim to provide substantive information in the newsletter itself.

If you have a blog, you may wonder if you can compile blog entries into a newsletter and “kill 2 birds with one stone” because you’d have both a blog presence and also a newsletter. You do indeed want to have both blog and newsletter when feasible - but a word of caution - you MUST add new and valuable information to the newsletter.

I understand that it may be tempting to “bundle and republish”, but then you may end up alienating customers who feel that they’re getting redundant information from you, and when that newsletter is sent to an inbox, your newsletter may be one click away from “Report as Spam”.

Check It Out - Evolution of One of My Newsletters

See how the newsletter I publish in the field-medical science liaison sector (Pharmaceutical Industry) has evolved over the years. Samples from 2006, 2007, and 2008.

Since these are previews I send to myself as an “email check/test”, the newsletters are personalized to my name, “Dear Jane”.

Clicking on each one will give you a larger email, and you can see how my approach has changed over the years.

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