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If you’re reading this, it might already be too late: Why digital publishing is taking over your life

Posted by George DiGuido on August 20, 2009 at 09:37 AM PDT

Ironically, there has been a lot published recently around the decline of advertising dollars being spent on traditional print initiatives.

Advertising rates continue to decline, ad pages are decreasing, and the forecast does not look to be getting better any time soon. No one saw this coming? All someone has to do is grab a seat next to me on the train every morning on my way to the office and take a look around. There are less and less newspapers being opened and more and more Kindles, Blackberries, and iPhones being turned on. There has been a shift in the way that people are consuming content. As a marketer you should be asking yourself, am I a publisher? Has there been a change in the way people are consuming the content that I am sending them? Will the same thing happen to me?

The changes in media consumption patterns are forcing marketers to rethink their traditional channels to get their messaging out. Just look at Southern Comfort who announced last week that they would put their entire media budget into digital. This is just the beginning. As Amazon’s Kindle and other eReaders gain more and more market share, people will increasingly turn to digital publications as their next newspaper or magazine.

The real question is how you get users to interact with your newly created digital assets. I’ll give you three guesses but if you’re reading this article you are only going to need one. Marketers should be looking for a platform that cannot only produce the digital asset but also one that offers them a complete solution that drives traffic, engagement and allows for tracking within the publication. Email is the tool that can help companies bridge the gap between print and digital.

Companies need to do a better job of using email to engage their audience. It is a lot cheaper and faster than print and how many people do you know who walk around without a Blackberry, iPhone or PDA? In the case of digital publications, email can be used to create a lifecycle message stream to engage their readers. An initial email to alert them of the publication release, the second the actual delivery of the publication, and then an array of follow-ups based on action or non-action taken within the publication. Take a web site publication for instance – analytics can be set up to track what a reader is looking at, where they’ve spent the most time and of course which items they’ve purchased. All of this at fractions of the cost of print and drive by email!

Email is a tool to drive engagement. It should be used as a catalyst for action and not simply a vehicle for the dissemination of information. Marketers don’t simply send email to have a recipient read it. Have email newsletters become today’s newspapers? Not likely. It is clear with the success realized by the launch of the Kindle that users like to read on a larger screen than a Blackberry or an iPhone. The key is going to be for marketers to drive adoption of these new digital assets within these new devices. Email is the key to drive this adoption. Not only can it server as a delivery mechanism for these new assets but it can serve as an acquisition vehicle as well.

What better way to communicate the launching of a new digital asset but through a trusted digital medium? A chasm has developed over the past decade that grows wider each year. On one side is traditional print media and on the other, the new digital age. Let email be the bridge between the two sides.

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