E-Newsletter Responses - Go For Quantity or Quality?

This may seem like a question that has an obvious answer. That is, go for both.

The dilemma that marketers face is this: If you construct your e-Newsletter to pull a lot of responses you maybe setting yourself up for a lot of responses that are meaningless.

How do you cause this to happen? Maybe you have a special offer that entices people to respond. So people respond to get the "free" offer. Or, maybe the response you are getting comes from people who liked the entertaining aspects of your letter.

The problem here is that they are not responding with serious intent to purchase your products or services.

The other side of the coin is a newsletter that is very focused and appeals to a very limited group of prospective customers. It may be technically dense and only undertandable to a limited number of readers. So, you get a very few responses but each response is from a reader who is seriously interested in doing business with you.

The moral of this is: don't feel badly if you didn't have a huge responses. If you had only one response and that resulted in a large order, it will have paid for the e-Newsletter campaign and made you some money.

Prescott "Pete" Lustig
Senior Marketing Strategist
www.loopconsulting.com