What’s your digital newsletter strategy for 2010 and beyond?
As PDF newsletters have become the portable digital format of choice over the last 10 years, readership habits have changed dramatically paving the way for a myriad of new digital newsletter delivery formats from Kindle and iPad to eZine and ePub…
Oh what a difference a decade can make. When we asked 45-year old digital newsletters subscribers how they read their digital newsletter issues in 2000, only 32-percent said they read at least some of each newsletter issue online. In 2010, that percentage has rocketed up to 64-percent. Online readership of PDF digital newsletters has doubled in 10 years.
———-
Content Marketing 2010: If you need to spend more time establishing your Digital Media Strategy, spend 90-minutes with Kim Mateus and Don Nicholas on April 13th for the Content Marketing 2010 Webinar: Using Content to Sell Books, Apps, Subscriptions and Live Events.
———-
What has changed about digital newsletters in 10 years?
Nothing. The PDF newsletters issues we studied are still eight to 12 pages in length, multiple articles, text and still graphics.
What has changed about digital subscribers in 10 years?
Plenty. For starters, their browser software now has an integrated PDF reader that opens their PDF digital newsletter in a browser window when they click on the issue icon or hyper-link. They spend more time online and have been online for more than 15 years now.
Key Difference: They are not the same people… the 45-year old reader who answered our survey in 2000 is now 55. Many of the 55-year old readers who answered our survey in 2000 have retired and are not in the 2010 sample. And perhaps most important, the 35 year old readers who answered our 2010 survey, were not in our sample back in 2000, having just entered the workforce and having no authority to use company funds to purchase a $200 newsletter subscription.
[text_ad]
The second digital newsletter show is preparing to drop
What will the 2020 digital newsletter readership survey discover? First, it will just be a newsletter readership survey since all newsletters will be digital in 2020. Will the PDF be the dominate newsletter format? My guess is no. I suspect that ePub or some other universal flexible format (UFF?) will be the dominate format as newsletters in 2020 will be delivered to a myriad of platforms and channels including desktop computers, laptop computers, personal media devices (PMDs) like Kindle and iPad, and mobile phones which by then will all be what we call Smart Phones today.
And each device will potentially have a dozen or more web apps, email apps and native apps capable of delivering newsletter subscriptions. These apps will offer users a mind-blowing mix of text, photos, graphics, audio, video and functionality. These periodical apps will absolutely blur the lines between newsletters, magazines, newspapers, websites, radio and television news. Users will have universal access via subscriptions to the content curators they trust on multiple devices that access a common server that also stores the user’s preferences and content consumption history.
Digital media change is about to accelerate
If you think the last 10 years have been heady, hang on tight. The digital natives that have grown up online will accept and require us as content marketers, producers and publishers to meet their information needs with a digital media strategy that gives them access to what they want, when they want it on any platform they choose.
———-
Content Marketing 2010: If you need to spend more time establishing your Digital Media Strategy, book 90-minutes with Kim Mateus and Don Nicholas on April 13th for their Content Marketing 2010 Webinar: Using Content to Sell Books, Apps, Subscriptions and Live Events.
———-
