Here's a point counterpoint by Christopher Knight of Ezine-Tips and contributing writer Suzanne Falter-Barns. Chris says blogs won't replace e-newsletters. Suzanne offers 7 reasons why they will. The real answer? Yes and no. No, in the short term blogs won't replace e-newsletters (aka ezines). You gotta get people to your blog to read it. And if they're not using RSS (see my tutorial), sending them an email reminder is the obvious way to get their attention. But yes, it's much easier to publish a blog than produce and deliver an HTML newsletter.
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I don't think it's an either/or. One is push, the other is pull.
I've had my greatest success when I combine a blog with an email newsletter. People who don't want to constantly come by again and again get the email newsletter once a month to give 'em the highlights.
Posted by: Kari Chisholm | June 22, 2005 at 09:15 PM
I think for now the safe way to do this is to combine the best of both worlds.
Publish say a monthly or bi-weekly newsletter and then try to produce short pithy posts to a blog.
I'm still trying to determine my newsletter topic though, but hey I've got step two solved.
On another note a major e-mail follow-up program is about to introduce an RSS addon to its main product which will supposedly do all kinds of interesting personalization and tracking of the RSS feed. So maybe that's yet another option to consider.
Posted by: Reagan | June 23, 2005 at 01:34 AM