Are e-newsletters going the way of the Dodo Bird?

Talk about grabbing your attention. I receive an e-newsletter from The Warrillow Group on a weekly basis and today’s was a doozy. The Warrillow Group is a Canadian based research firm focused on the SMB market. There information is pretty interesting and you may want to check out their site. This week’s newsletter came with the following subject line – “The beginning of the end for the e-newsletter”. Now I am signed up to more than a few newsletters and most of the time I delete before reading them, as most of you probably do as well. But this one I opened.

As you rifle through your inbox (and through all the e-newsletters you no doubt have piled up in it), it’s probably hard to conceive e-newsletters going out of style anytime soon. But its popularity with businesses is precisely why Warrillow’s survey says e-newsletters are on their way out eventually…not tomorrow, but eventually. The survey, answered by small business owners with fewer than 100 employees, found the SMB marketers have become too reliant on e-newsletters, and that e-newsletters are being read less and less, not making it through spam filters.

Now this report is really aimed at companies selling to SMBs, letting them know that they need to do something else to reach the target. In fact, 84% of Fortune 500 companies selling products to SMBs have an e-newsletter. But you know businesses of all sizes are sending e-newsletters out with reckless abandon because it’s easy and cheap to do so. Causing a fraction of them to be read.

Warrillow points out that RSS (Really Simple Syndication), may be the tool that may replace e-newsletters. Many folks, including yours truly in a post on my personal blog, believe RSS will supplant e-newsletters at some point in time. Mainly because it puts the power of choice in the end user’s hand, and allows them to take back control of their inbox. And with Microsoft Vista and Office 2007 due out shortly, RSS will be hitting the mainstream at some point. So now would be a good time to acquaint yourself with it from a business perspective, and how it can enable you to get your messages through to the desired target.

To get more of this information you may want to sign up for Warrillow’s e-newsletter. Unfortunately it doesn’t appear they have a blog or RSS feed yet. I guess that means e-newsletters still have a little time left before they become extinct.

Posted by Brent Leary on Tue, Dec 19, 2006 @ 10:13 PM