Jakob Nielsen: how email newsletters can offer good eROI

Submitted by: denise cox on Tue, 03/04/2007 - 11:35

In a recent Alertbox (“10 High-Profit Redesign Priorities“), Jakob Nielsen put forth his top ten list of web re-designs that can increase a company’s eROI.

One of the ten: Email Newsletters

He writes, “Email newsletters let you maintain a relationship with your customers that lasts beyond their visits to your site. The newsletter is the perfect website companion because it answers a different user need: newsletters keep customers informed and in touch with the company; websites give customers detailed information and let them perform business transactions.

Newsletters are fairly cheap. They require little technology and mustn’t be published too frequently. If you don’t have a newsletter, then publishing one is probably the single-highest ROI action you can take to improve your Internet presence. If you do have a newsletter, then improving it according to research findings will likely make it several times more valuable to your organization.”

He adds this aside: “Newsletters have one more benefit: they are the primary way to liberate your site from dependence on search engines. In the long run, achieving this liberation is one of the most important strategic challenges facing Internet managers.”