I was recently asked by a client ‘Why have an email newsletter and a blog, wouldn’t one or the other be enough?’ Good question. Here’s what I told them.

Newsletters and blogs are great tools for reaching your audience but it’s easy to believe that you only need one or the other to market your business. By using both, some business owners fear they will put their audience off with information overload, or they don’t have the time to produce the content. What’s more, ultimately the benefits and end results are the same: They help you connect with your audience, keep your brand or service in the forefront of their minds and drive traffic to your website. So why bother? The answer is in the delivery.

Email newsletters are fantastic because they are delivered to the recipient. With everyone being so busy this is a great way of reaching your audience where you will find them every day: Their inbox. By providing a newsletter service you are giving your audience a chance to opt-in, thereby building a list of contacts that are interested in your product or service. With email marketing tools, such as AWeber, Constant Contact or MailChimp, this can be done cost effectively and in some cases for free. These tools can create a whole host of statistics that divulge all sorts about your audience. This really helps you to understand your market, what they like and don’t like, and tailor your content (or special offers and promotions) accordingly.

Like newsletters, blogs also help you connect with your audience. If you have a blog on your website, it can help drive traffic there while giving your brand a personality. Search engines, such as Google, love fresh content so by posting regularly it helps keep your brand visible too. By allowing comments on your blog you can encourage conversation and a level of trust with your audience which is so important when buying online.  People buy from people they like, know and trust. It’s harder to build relationships online where contact is predominantly through a computer screen so a blog is an opportunity to show your area of expertise in a relaxed, personable way. The difference is that you are relying on the pro-activity of your reader to come to you each time you post. You can subscribe to blogs through an RSS Reader but many don’t. It largely depends on your audience. I love RSS and it’s featured in my previous post on productivity tools because it’s fab.

You may have some people subscribing to your blog and newsletters, which is great – but usually it will be one or the other. By providing both you are reaching out to a much wider audience. What’s more, different subscribers means you can use the same content for both, with maybe a little tweaking so no need to worry about writing heaps of content. A blog and newsletter attracts different people so it shouldn’t be a question of ‘which shall I use?’. Everyone looks for information in different ways. This is why it is so important to use both tools, as well as considering the needs of your target audience to help propel your online presence.