{Originally published on Dianna Huff’s B2B MarCom Writers Blog}

According to an October 2008 survey of 189 marketing professionals by Forrester Research (Making Social Media Work in B2B Marketing), B2B marketers continue to rely on traditional digital marketing methods to drive leads — including e-mail newsletters.

Yet, given the rise of blogs and other social media tactics — and overflowing e-mail inboxes — you might wonder if something as lowly as the e-newsletter is still a viable tactic.

The answer is: most definitely. Think about it. Despite the buzz about social media, email remains the #1 activity on the Internet. This means that all of us check email, read email, and respond to email constantly.

Plus, not everyone reads blogs or has a LinkedIn/Facebook account. I’ve had PR and marketing professionals tell me they never read blogs but they continue to read newsletters, something I realized based on my own experience.

Although I have this blog and Twitter, LinkedIn, and Facebook accounts, I still have people subscribing to my e-newsletter every single day.

(But, just because people still subscribe to e-newsletters doesn’t mean they’re reading them. If I get tired of a company’s e-newsletter, for example, I don’t unsubscribe, I simply delete it without reading it.)

If you’re a marketer who has been putting out an e-newsletter for years, now is a great time to look it over to see how you can re-invigorate your publication, and your audience, too, with the following tips:

1. Look at your email stats for the last year.

• How many people subscribed?
• How many unsubscribed?
• How did subscribers find your newsletter or what prompted them to sign up?
• If you use your e-newsletter to get people to take some sort of action, such as downloading white papers or signing up for Webinars, what percentage of your subscribers did so?
• How often was your newsletter forwarded to others?
• How often was content in your e-newsletter posted to blogs, appear in Twitter posts, or reprinted or mentioned in other e-newsletters or trade publications?

2. Survey your readership.

Set up a simple survery using one of the free tools available, such as Zoomerang or Survey Monkey. Constant Contact now offers survey capabilities, too.

Keep the survey short and sweet so that you don’t waste people’s time. (I like to keep my surveys to ten easy questions that can be answered in two minutes or less.)

Ask your subscribers how often they want to receive the newsletter and what topics they want to read about. If you’re a larger company with multiple products or business units sending out one e-newsletter a month, ask your readers if they would like content written just for them.

3. Make your newsletter a priority.

Newsletters tend to fall through the cracks, I think, because they’re seen as “fluff” versus revenue generators.

For an e-newsletter to be successful — that is, to generate leads and ultimately sales — you have to make it a priority. This means you publish it on time all the time, that you continually develop new content for it (and not use warmed over press releases), and that you analyze your statistics in order to explain to management why the e-newsletter is a necessary marketing tactic.

Done right, B2B e-newsletters are a great way to stay top-of-mind with prospects not yet ready to buy and maintain relationships with current clients. It’s why I’m still publishing mine and have been doing so for the last eight years.

For additional information about email marketing, be sure to download the following reports and articles (which came to me via e-newsletters — ha!):

Exact Target: No Executive Left Behind: 10 Things Your C-Suite MUST KNOW About Email Now

SilverPop: Spam: What Customers Really Think

ClickZ: 10 Reasons to Be Thankful for E-mail by Karen Gedney

Are you a B2B marketer with an e-newsletter success story? If so, I’d love to feature it on this blog. Drop me an email at: info@dhcommunications.com

Editor’s Pick by Melissa at Breaking The Dress Code: Dianna Huff specializes in B2B marketing communications and search engine optimization (SEO) services. Her site B2B MarCom Writers Blog focus on issues and information specific to B2B marketing. This original post can be found on her site. Subscribe to the feed or follow her on Twitter.