Online Newsletters Replacing Printed Newsletters

Many organizations have decided to stop printing and mailing newsletters to save money. In fact, in a recent survey a majority of business owners said they prefer to receive their monthly newsletter via email.

As the first step in replacing printed and mailed newsletter, many organizations are currently posting a standard PDF file on their web sites and sending emails linking to the PDF file.

Long term we think a better solution is a newsletter designed for the web. Here is a sample of what we are developing for the Dunedin Florida Chamber of Commerce. http://adsharp.com/blog/.

The Dunedin prototype is a blog or content management system. The end result is a "newsletter" that looks like a web page. It is designed to be read on computers. Trying to use printing technology and make it fit a computer screen is a mismatch and old technology.

Of course, most organizations are familiar with printing technology and they will have to learn new skills. From my point of view, the production skills are very similar but many people are resistant to change and to the cost and time of learning new skills.

Bottom line, I believe most organizations will move to real online "newsletters." The cost saving are substantial and most business people prefer to communicate via the Internet.

I wrote an earlier post about disappearing phone books. Here is a link to a story about the changing business model for yellow pages.