Image by Nicole Lee

Collecting email addresses is one the primary aims of many online businesses - “the money is in the list” - so it’s perhaps surprising that blog newsletters are so unusual in comparison.

Last week I came across an article discussing the strategy of creating email newsletters for your blog, suggested primarily as a response to the declining value of RSS subscribers.

Competitions, such as the John Chow vs Shoemoney competition, and RSS ‘bundling’, where users are automatically subscribed to a number of blogs if they select a certain ‘bundle’ in Google, have devalued the importance of RSS subscriber numbers. Consider Duct Tape Marketing for example. It has 202,000 subscribers, yet has an Alexa Rank of just over 100,000. Clearly not many of those 202,000 subscribers are daily visitors. In fact, you could argue that less than 0.5% are (although it is a great blog).

The alternative that some people are talking about is the strategy of creating a regular email newsletter. But why would you want to start one?

To share secrets

Not everyone wants to share their best tips and tricks with the whole internet audience, especially when scraper sites can frequently steal their content and claim credit as its original source.

To send tailored messages

Blogs are great but their format means that for new visitors all too often you’re only as good as your last post. Publishing posts about site updates or reader requests is not particularly enticing to new readers. Email newsletters allow you to send this content directly to your regular readers, allowing you to create content tailored to your audience.

To create value

Not value from a readers’ point of view, but value from a blog owner’s point of view. Email newsletters are a much more attractive for advertisers than simple on-site buttons or banners, and are also better places to embed affiliate links, as promoting affiliate products within the content of your blog can affect its credibility in the eyes of its readers.

But are the above reasons enough to consider actually starting a newsletter for your blog?

I’m not convinced. Email open rates have been falling year on year, reaching a new low of 22% this year. Of those emails that are opened, only around 20% of recipients go on to click through to a site. With these figures it’s questionable whether it is an improvement on RSS subscribers.

And this is before you even go into the topic of what to include in your newsletter. Sign-ups are fairly easy - offer a free ebook and many people will register, but then what? How many newsletters do you actually look forward to receiving? I can only think of one - the new business ideas newsletter from Springwise, and even that just contains content which is freely available on their site.

But what do you think? Would you consider creating a regular email newsletter for your blog?

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