Often enough declared dead, dismissed as an outdated push medium - and unfortunately often abused as a spam machine: Not everyone has the best reputation for the newsletter. In fact, it seems to me as if it is currently experiencing a renaissance; or it never really went away. I've noticed this myself: In the past few months, I've subscribed to a number of additional newsletters. At the same time, the number of subscribers to my own newsletter has been growing faster than ever for some time. The latter may be because I'm revising the concept and putting more focus on it myself. But the development is clear, even when I look at colleagues. Why is linkedin data that? How can you use this development in your communication?
Why are newsletters (again) so popular?
For many subscribers, newsletters never really went away. For years, I saw my newsletter, alongside my blog and information offerings elsewhere on the web, as a medium for people who prefer more traditional means of communication.
A few years ago, there was a hail of unsubscribes, and some of the now former subscribers were kind enough to tell me why they no longer wanted to receive my news in their inbox every month. A typical response was: "I've subscribed to your blog via RSS feed, and I follow you on social networks. I don't need the same information as an email." The newsletter also had the reputation of being a push medium: instead of pulling information from the internet itself ("pull"), I get it pushed into my inbox ("push"). That's not really true, because at least the initial subscription is an act of the person who wants to receive the emails in the future. At least that's how it should be.
But it is now becoming increasingly difficult to find your way around the huge flood of information. There are so many links and references in social networks alone. Even through services such as Flipboard and Refind, with their good structure, you have to find your way through first, and in doing so you have to separate the essential from the inessential. Hardly anyone has the time to search through all the blogs and online magazines that are relevant to them every day for interesting news - as was quite common in the early days of the Internet.