Print vs. Email Newsletters:
Six Reasons You Shouldn't Only Do Email.

By David Gruttadaurio.

A Nielsen Norman Group Report revealed that the typical email newsletter gets 51 seconds of your reader's time.
That was three years ago. Today, many say its closer to 26 seconds. And, that's if your email newsletter is even opened.

You're Not as Popular as You Think:
While you believe YOUR e-mail newsletters are special and opened like gifts on Christmas morning, remember this: Dozens of emails are routinely wiped out daily in one swoop with the push of the delete key.
Even if the reader recognizes your name, you can be expunged just because they're having a busy day or your email got caught in a large block of spam.
Now, I'm not suggesting that you stop doing email newsletters. In fact, I advise you to do an email newsletter on a weekly basis. But, I also suggest doing a monthly print newsletter.

Here's why...
6 Ways Print Newsletters Beat Email Newsletters -And Why They Need to Be Part of Your Marketing Mix:

1. Printed mail gets delivered. It's never blocked or caught in spam filters. Faulty connections, email authentication and webmail service idiosyncrasies are not issues. And, you have no worries about connection speeds.

2. Print newsletters have more perceived value. Think about it: how many companies are willing to do this? Your clients aren’t stupid. They understand the energy, cost and time required to send them a great newsletter every month. It will get their immediate attention. 

3. print newsletters let you use unlimited amount of images. A picture really is worth a thousand words. Print newsletters are not shackled by bandwidth. That means you can use a variety of text, graphics and formatting styles to capture the interest of your clients. 

4. print newsletters are sticky. Print newsletters have great hange-time. Not only are they likely to be read from start to finish, they usually get passed around. 

Hand-along readership can be as high as four-to-one. Talk about free marketing!

5. Print newsletters offer convenient and comfortable reading. Printed newsletters are much easier on the eyes. Reading articles of any length on a computer screen is uncomfortable and often inconvenient. Plus, a print newsletter allows you to mark sections you find interesting, take it to work and leave it there to be picked up by
workmates.

6. Print newsletters stand out and get noticed. By using color, logos and a familiar return address, a print newsletter is easy to spot. With an inbox filled with subject lines, every message looks the same.
With everyone bombarded by email overload, do you really think your e-mail blasts are being read?

Here's Your Best Bet:
Make no mistake. There is a place for electronic communication with your customers. Websites and email are an important part of any business
But the hands down best choice for keeping customers and getting more referrals and building relationships is to include print newsletters within your marketing mix.
You can even offer your customers a choice. They will see that you really care about what they want, not just what you are willing to provide for them.
And that's what relationship marketing is all about, isn't it?
Print Newsletter Marketing Expert David Gruttadaurio was tired of wasting money on marketing that didn't work. So he searched for a marketing tool that would give him more clients for his cleaning business. Then he found newsletter marketing! Through print newsletters he was able to triple his sales. Now, discover how he got and retained more clients with his FREE "Profit Exploding Newsletter Secrets Report" at http://www.NewslettersMadeForYou.com.

Some Consumers Are Ready For Good Times.

By Richard H. Levey, Direct Magazine.

On the contrary, 36% of all shoppers are labeled "potential rebounders," meaning they'll open their wallets when they see improvement, Acxiom reports.
Another 46% are in the 'status quo" category - they're reluctant to change their behavior from what it is right now And 18% are "digging in": Don't expect orders from them anytime soon.
Each of these classifications has further subgroups. For example, the potential rebounders includes one Acxiom calls "it's my life." Unlike "savvy spenders" or people in the "protecting the dream" subsets, these consumers are responsive to direct marketing, especially direct mail and email. And they make up around 12% of the total consumer population.
Who are they? They tend to be affluent younger adults with few financial obligations like kids.
Price is not a priority for them. But they're opportunistic, and will search for low costs
In addition, they value communication via direct mail, e-mail and new media more than people in any of the other subgroups. And they're as responsive as anyone else to mass media, word of mouth and couponing.

Study Reveals Importance of Personalization.
Over 70% of adults say they are between five and ten times more likely to respond to properly personalized marketing offers, compared to standardized or superficially personalized communications.
The latest research from direct communications specialist GI Direct reveals that over 70% of adults say they are between five and ten times more likely to respond to properly personalized marketing offers, compared to standardized or superficially personalized communications.
The study, aimed at obtaining a basic benchmark for the uplift generally produced by highly personalized direct marketing and direct mail, revealed some interesting regional variations. Scotland and the South emerge as the greatest devotees of personalized direct marketing. In contrast, East Anglia and the North West appear more jaded and less receptive to high levels of targeting. However, leaving these relative differences aside, the overall picture remains that personalization has a very significant effect on at least three fifths of the population.
Many brands and retail outlets will also be interested by the finding emerging from this study that women are particularly keen on personalization, with 78% indicating a very significant response uplift, compared to just 65% of men who gave the same answer.
Patrick Headley, Sales Director, GI Direct, comments: "This research finding gives hard evidence of the critical importance of targeted direct marketing in the current recessionary climate, when sales and campaign response are generally in decline."
'The fact remains that the majority of organizations are not using more than superficial level of personalization generally applied in their direct marketing campaigns, in order to ensure – at the least – they are matching competitor standards, and – the best – exceeding the market norm in order to improve campaign responsiveness and subsequent sales. 

Talon Makes Saving Money On Mailings Automatic.

By Michael Borkan.

Talon introduces automatic reporting that estimates additional money our clients can save on upcoming mailing campaigns.

Mailers have heard it many times before: Perform various file-clean up procedures and save money on mailings. Who could blame the client if after a while it goes in one ear and out the other?
To make matters worse, sometimes in a rush to get a mailing project out the door, the client or mailing service provider will overlook possible ways to save on mailing costs.
To help our clients reduce mailing costs and to help them boost their profits, Talon has introduced free automatic reporting that will estimate and report in actual projected dollars how they can save money for each of the services we offer.
The best feature of the analysis is that Talon does all the estimating. By factoring in such elements as:
• Mailing quantity
• Postage & printing costs
• Mailing list and mailing service costs
• Average percentage of records cleaned by each offered service
Once the analysis is complete Talon will email the client a report showing the various estimated savings for each service we provide
The client can pick and choose which of the services they want, if any. Sometimes the cost savings is a "no-brainer", other times the reporting can show if a particular service may not offer a substantial savings

Is It Really Craig's Fault?

By Sarah Lacy

Newspaper boosters are quick to blame the Internet for the death of dailies. The frequent object of their ire is Craigslist, which lets users post local ads for nothing.

Craigslist CEO Craig Newmark begs to differ. In my interview with him on Yahoo's TechTicker last year, he said his site has had a "significant, but still pretty small" impact on classified-ad placement. In his view, local newspapers are at least partly to blame for
their own demise. "Newspapers have much bigger issues,"
he continued. "Conventional news media have forgotten they're a community service. They're supposed to speak truth to power and do things like fact-checking and editing, and when newspapers forget to do that they lose more trust. And that is more damaging than anything we could ever do."
Whatever the root cause of the upheaval among local papers, local advertisers are not rushing to online local sites to fill the void left by this moribund industry. And that means Web sites hoping to profit from local Internet advertising may be in for as big a struggle as their counterparts in print.