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By Neil Anuskiewicz
Newsletters, however, are all about building long-term relationships. They often include calls-to-action, but their primary goal is to strengthen the relationship between the customer or prospect and the organization sending the email.
The goal of email newsletters is often to encourage actions over the long-term. E-newsletters try to make the recipient more likely at some point in the future to take the kind of actions desired by the publisher, and take them again and again (i.e. repeated purchases).
Email promotions focus mostly on persuasion, while newsletters focus mostly on trust and loyalty. Promotions look for immediate returns, newsletters for long-term benefits. Promotions make an offer, newsletters offer value.
Confusing the two types of emails can lead to problems. Subscribers expecting an email newsletter often find themselves receiving pure promotional emails. Since the emails don't meet their expectations, the response is low and unsubscribe rate high. The publisher then rejects the idea of an email newsletter because they think it doesn't work.
Expectations are the crucial factor here. It's not the sending of commercial messages that's the problem, but the failure to meet the recipient's expectations. Sending promotional emails to email newsletter subscribers is far less effective then sending newsletters to newsletter subscribers or sending promotional emails to those who opted in for explicit promotions.
So if you send regular emails to customers or prospects, make sure you understand the difference between email promotions and email newsletters, and design your emails and promote your list accordingly. It's not that one form of email marketing is better than the other, but make sure your email recipients' expectations match what you are doing.
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