Email Marketing by the Numbers: How to Use the World’s Greatest Marketing Tool to Take Any Organization to the Next Level

Warning: Consumers Will Revolt against Irrelevant Content!

This should come as no surprise to you. We already established the fact that your constituents don’t like for you to waste their time. We also established the idea that the term newsletter may not accurately describe the type of communication you should be having with your audience. Here’s another reason why: The idea of a newsletter is that if you include a few articles and stories, some of it will be relevant to every one of your subscribers. It’s the same thing with a newspaper—maybe you read the Entertainment and Lifestyle section, while your wife reads Money and Current Events. The more variety, the better your chances of striking a relevant cord with each individual in the audience.

Let’s take a time machine back to the pre-Gutenberg years, when there was no printing press. News traveled by word of mouth, right? The great thing about this type of communication was that you could guarantee it was received and likely to be relevant to the person receiving it. (I’d like to think that people spoke with a real purpose back then.)

On the other hand, oral communication presented a big consistency problem. Ever played the game telephone? You sit in a circle and whisper some saying or story to the person sitting next to you. Then this person tells the person beside him, and so on it goes, around the circle. At the end, the last person conveys what they heard (“Elephants have wings, and you sound like Elvis when you sing?”) ...