Yes there is a big difference. Newsletters can be used to convey all sorts of information including sales on new products or clearance bargains on old products, etc., hence the term “News.”
But when all your newsletter says is, “BUY, BUY, BUY,” you have a “Sales letter.” And frankly speaking, probably you have a serious case of “False Advertising” as well.
For it is undoubtedly just possible that you achieved the names on your mailing list by advertising some sort of “Newsletter.”
Oh well, if the bluegrass police haven't caught up with you yet, maybe you're safe for the time being ... but is “being safe” really what you want?
I'll bet the answer is “NO”. What you really want is to achieve more sales through greater awareness of, and greater appreciation for your product. What you really want is to increase your earning potential from the creation of:
- A) new fans and/or
- B) better bonding with fans.
The number of so called newsletters that cross our desk on a weekly basis that do not contain actual news but do contain some sort of sales pitch is astounding. And yes, a lot of them do come from bluegrass bands or their representative agencies.
I've written before about creating content for your newsletter and, I don't mean to be repetitive, but to some degree refreshing those concepts may be necessary on numerous occasions ... just like watching a movie for the second and third time always seems to impart something previous viewings didn't reveal.
One of the worst offenders of the poor newsletter senders is the band that thinks the newsletter is a replacement for their regular Email. You know the ones who do this - the ones who send out a newsletter with a gigantic header with the band name and logo taking up half of the computer screen when you open it up and then all there actually is to the message is something like:
“Announcing our Gig this weekend at Jimmy's Crab Shack and Pizza Parlor – Hope To See y’all there”
Many is the time they get in such a hurry to get the “News” out that they even forget to give us the address or even the city where Jimmy's is located.
So what is it that they wanted to do with this type of newsletter? Sell tickets at the door? Sell CDs? Sell something for sure … but no real news of any kind. Why use a newsletter and an E-Blast concept when all you're really doing is generating a “Little Boy Who Cried Wolf” scenario for your band or yourself?
There are a few of these where I've gone to the extreme action of “Unsubscribing” to the band's newsletter because they just never contain anything of substance (read: news) but do get to be an annoyance.
If you advertise a “NEWSLETTER” to your fans and obtain their permission to send them a newsletter, aren't you really violating that permission if all you send is one sales pitch after another with too much frequency? Aren't you really defeating your purpose of generating new fans and cementing the bond between you and the reader.
How many new sign-ups do you think you would actually get if your web page or Facebook post really said what you intended to do? If you said, “Sign up for our four-time-a-week EBLAST so that we can gain more email addresses in our database and annoy more of you more often,” would you ever get any new sign-ups at all?
Our newsletter is intended to provide a different way for you to get the bluegrass news you may have missed for one reason or another. It's also intended to be a source for both artists and fans to see what songs are getting played on Prescription Bluegrass Radio. And lastly, it is a tool for us to use to help promote some of the new and special features we provide on the Prescription Bluegrass Website.
We enjoy and appreciate the feedback we get on our newsletter and quite often have used it for improvement.
If you don’t get our weekly or our daily newsletters here are the sign up links:
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