Electronic Newsletter or "email newsletter" is a powerful communication tool often overlooked by churches for lack of time, human resource, skills, email platform, or content ideas to execute it.
As complicated as it may sound, email newsletter is a lot simpler than you may think if you have the right tools (which we will provide later) and you know your goals for utilizing it.
Advantages of Electronic Newsletters
1. Cost-effective
Sending out email versus printing hard-copy bulletins are more cost-effective. There are email platforms out there such as www.constantcontact.com that start as low as $15/month. If you have a small email list, this is a good choice.
2. Environment-friendly
Since you no longer are printing a hard-copy or you're printing less (at least just making the hard-copies available to your elderly members and those without internet access), then you will have less paper usage.
3. More Interactive
Being that your primary goal is to communicate with your congregation/subscribers and since it is electronic, you can easily direct your subscribers to a page on your website or a blog where they can make comments about certain topic on your newsletter or if they want it to be more private they can easily hit reply (depending on how your email marketing is configured) to send you their feedbacks or ask questions. With a traditional newsletter, this is hard to accomplish. Usually the bulletins are just thrown in the trash at the end of the day.
4. Drives Traffic to Your Website
Like I mentioned in #3, you can encourage visits to your website by directing your readers to a page or a blog post. Once they are there, you can occasionally direct them to other areas on your website as well.
5. Can Be Easily "Viralized"
Your readers can easily forward an email to their friends and colleagues. They can tweet, facebook with a link to your newsletter, bookmark it...the list goes on. You can grow your subscriber list this way as well. An individual who might have received a forwarded newsletter might eventually just decide to subscribe to your newsletter herself so she can get it directly in her inbox.
In our next newsletters and blog posts, we will discuss more about newsletters. We will post some resources, helpful tips and advices on how to properly and effectively carry out this powerful electronic communication tool.
