By Gary Wagnon

As small businesses and large Corporations alike are realizing, the Internet isn’t the end all that for a period of time it appeared to be. Why pay for a newsletter when, for free, one can be mailed to any number of customers and potential clients for free? It seemed an easy, and wise, choice to make, and a way to cut costs.

Unfortunately, though, it turns out emails aren’t as effective in many, many ways that a printed newsletter is. While it’s true that the amount of numbers you can send are unlimited, the truth has come out that it’s just not as effective. Emails are easy to delete, lose in spam and simply ignore (I’ll read this later…and then never return as it slips down the long list of new emails arriving every day).

But the hard copy is not so easy to lose. It can be put aside, then found, even many days later. You can be sipping coffee and notice it sitting in a corner and pick it up. When you pick up your mail you have to physically throw it away, and many times it’s just as easy to lay it aside with the thought of reading it later. And, with good content and personal information that your reader is interested in, they really do want to read it later.

So, companies are learning that the hard copy wasn’t as dead as they thought it was…in fact, by the numbers, it’s actually MORE effective per amount sent. While 10,000 emails may be sent, just a thousand hard copy newsletters may bring drastically more effective results.

One non-profit organization I know, for cost saving reasons and what they thought more effectiveness as well, stopped their hard copy newsletter (actually a newspaper, which was very professional and contained more content that a typical newsletter), to use the Internet instead. Within months, their donations, both cash and material items, plunged drastically. When they started up their newspaper again, their donations sky-rocketed back up again.

The daily newspaper is dying, we know that. But the “niche” paper, printed material that specifically addresses people’s interests, are on the rise…people haven’t stop wanting to read things on paper…they just want to read those things they are actually concerned with.

And the newsletter is a powerful, inexpensive way of accomplishing this… yes, even in this day of the Internet.