To understand the importance of newsletters there are some important statistics to know:

- People don’t remember your name until they’ve seen it 9 times.

- Email is nearly 40 times more effective at acquiring new customers than Facebook and Twitter combined. (report by McKinsey management firm 2014)

- Adults were twice as likely to sign up for emails to stay in touch with a brand than to interact with that brand on Facebook. (Forrester report)

- Email marketing is growing by 20% a year. (transparency market research released in 2012)

- Customers relate to your story, not simply your product.

As a business owner and consultant to others, I get frustrated time and again when I see sales professionals looking for the magic bullet. That one amazing ingredient that will forever change their business. That one new marketing idea that will create more business than they’ve ever dreamed of. And people advertise for that exact same thing! Working with real estate agents for many years, I have seen time and again that agents will distribute thousands of new marketing flyers in a neighbourhood with no result, and then do the exact same thing in the next neighbourhood expecting a different result.

It has been proven time and again that to create an enduring reputation, the essence of any referral business, it takes a measure of discipline few possess. I personally invested $80,000 in the toughest coaching program in the USA for sales professionals over 2.5 years that helped me grow my business by 20% in the GFC when the market around me shrank by 50%. Why? Because I had been nurturing and developing my relationships with my clients over 5+ years and when the market soured, people were anxious to talk to professionals that could be trusted and because I had been sharing the good, the bad and the ugly with all my clients over the years, I had built that relationship.

Communication needs to be monthly, without fail, every time. We often work in 90 day spurts, we can do something great for 90 days then we get bored or something better comes along. A referral business is based on boring old repetition! EVERY MONTH!

People want to know your story. We have this fascination with product and sales, yet we have forgotten the core human concept of relationship.

Looking for an example? Last week I was in the city for a business appointment and decided to go for a walk into the city for half an hour. Little did I know that I was parked in a clearway from 4pm! I left my car at 3:55 and returned at 4:25 only to discover my car was gone!! It had been towed at exactly 4:10pm by the ever efficient city council. It was an experience I will never repeat and an expensive lesson learnt.

When we talk about E-Newsletters, its critical to identify exactly what is an E-Newsletter. Perhaps its easier to say what it is not. An E-Newsletter is NOT a marketing tool and avenue to push products or services. An E-Newsletter is only a true communication piece if it contains a story. Why? Because we as humans relate to stories, we like to hear about fun things, about things that went wrong, about things that have changed us. Its what makes us real.

As the CEO of ULetters, its been my guiding principle in everything I do with the company to create a platform to tell that story. To provide a tool that is easy to use to enable clients to communicate with their customers EVERY month (It needs to be every month!) and include a personal story as well as interesting information that 

people will remember.

Do E-Newsletters work? Absolutely. Why? Because people want relationships, they want to know your story, not just your product or service.