Community Building Through Newsletters
“A community needs news,for the same reason that a man needs eyes. It has to see where it is going.”
~British author Dame Rebecca West
In today’s digital world, new messaging and communication applications sprout out every day, sending out newsletters might be considered ancient technology.
History Lesson
The history of newsletters actually started well before there was even newspaper, with research showing that newsletters were circulating in Europe the 16th and 17th Century, featuring news about political and diplomatic issues in those regions.
Towards the beginning of the 18th Century, many newsletters transitioned into newspapers. Corporate newsletters emerged in the 1930s because of the need in different industries for specialized knowledge transmission. Telecommunications Reports, a telecommunications industry newsletter (surprise!), was one of the first such newsletters to be issued in 1934. This was followed by a number of other business newsletters. Newsletters became commonplace with topics that range from farming to fashion.
So why are newsletters still relevant today?
Email is not dead. The previous two decades of popular engagement with the internet has shown that people generally prefer to receive information relevant to them via email. Though there are frequent proclamations of its (un)timely death, email has remained strong. It is still relevant and important today for all manners of businesses for marketing purposes.
In 2016, Adestra commissioned a study to study consumer behaviour regarding email, what they found was that even teenagers preferred to use email to communicate with commercial entities: according to the study, close to 73 percent of Millennials prefer email for that.
Another finding from the report is that people may not immediately open and read an email newsletter, even if they are interested in the topic. 59 percent of those surveyed say they would leave an email unread if they plan to read it later, and 33 percent say they use flags in their email client to mark emails they want to read later.
Email is still the best way to deliver content that interests your community directly to them. Advances in technology in the last decade have made emails more efficient at what they do. We now have better ways to transfer large files through cloud storage, as opposed to large attachment files in the past. And as spam filters become more capable of sorting emails and eliminating spam, the result of this has been to free emails to be what it was always meant to be — short, simple, primarily text-based content sent directly to a readership that is easy to read. They can also be stored and read offline. Yet if they are read online, they permit people to respond right away by clicking to purchase, subscribe or read more.
Perhaps most importantly for why email is still though, is how well email reads on mobile devices. Emails are extremely lightweight, which means they download quickly and render beautifully even when compared with mobile websites which strive to achieve this result.
Email newsletters are not just limited to one-way communication though, but according to Forbes, email is the most widely tracked source of data that companies use for analytics. So as newsletterers can be sending out valuable and relevant information to a readership, that same readership can provide invaluable information to senders.
Community Building
Communities are built around shared interest and communication. Newsletters gives your organization a chance to direct the conversation and keep the community in the loop about what is happening within the community.
Given how valuable email is as a tool for business communication and marketing for any organization, Juven has built an email template builder. This, along with forms & surveys, membership functions, and events, is all to support organizations that want to engage and build their community.
Juven’s email builder is easy to use — just drag and drop the appropriate element. Currently elements include “organization logo”, “title”, “greeting”, “text paragraph” and “image”. The greeting is automatically linked to any and every contact you may wish to send the email to according to their entry in your organization membership list. Moreover we are constantly improving our platform to provide the best possible service in supporting organizations.
The importance of engaging your community with interesting, valuable and relevant information over email cannot be overstated. Newsletters gives your organization a strong, direct connection with your readership, helping you engage and maintain relationships.
Log on to Juven, create a free account and try our email builder tool today!
Juven builds integrated organization software that empowers charities, companies, associations and clubs of all sorts to build, engage and grow community. We believe that organizations should have access to beautiful, intuitive and reliable tools to create greater impact.
