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When Marketers first start doing email marketing, they often assume they need an instant email newsletter right away. |
It'll have everything their customers care about, all in one place. Assuming that people will look forward to getting one since it will be sent once a month. All things are easy to put together to have a great newsletter.
While this may be true for the fortunate individuals, lots of email newsletter fiasco on the side. They become an uninteresting mush of content people automatically ignore, archive, delete, or straight up unsubscribe from.
This is a bad news for your metrics, it measures your company success. Email newsletters never go out of fad in this modern day of digital age. Curated content has become a trend to reach and engages with the right audience. Even so, the popularity of social media platforms to reach people, an email newsletter is an intimate vehicle for sharing the in-depth personalized message to your loyal customers. It can be news, stories and personal viewpoint. The utmost purpose of e-newsletters is to educate the readers not "selling".
Newsletters are an extremely valuable marketing tool used by ourselves as well as by our customers. One of the most important tasks for a business is to maintain contact with its customer developing a strategy to attract new customers and retaining existing clients is crucial to successful marketing.
If you don’t have a newsletter, here are the reasons you should:
Increase brand awareness
Your newsletter should give enough information to create awareness about what you are offering your customers and your brand. You should have a clear picture of how it will be dealing with you, or to buy your products. Make them feel compelled to find out more.
Position your brand
You should create the best first impression of your products or services in your newsletter. As they say, the first impression lasts. It is a strong marketing tool to differentiate businesses from one another.
More business from current clients
Without being pushy make your clients feel the worth and value of your product. With Email marketing and Newsletters, they will become repeat clients when they feel this is the best for them.
Educate prospects
A newsletter that provides prospective clients with valuable information helps them make better decisions. This is the time you can show that you are an expert or your product is the best in the market until they are ready to hire you or use your product.
Word-of-mouth referrals
Newsletters have pass-along value. If the content is relevant and powerful to your customers they will share it with an average of three people online or more.
Build your contact list
This is a good lead capture on your website. In order for the visitors to Signup to your Newsletter, they will have to provide their names and emails. In networking events, you can offer to send your newsletter to people who provide their business card.
Brings traffic to your website
Your newsletter content can be reused as content on your website or blog, generating additional traffic from search engines and social media.
Shorten the sales process
People who respond to your newsletter are better informed about what you and it shortens the decision time to make business with you unlike those coming from adverts.
Karl Murray say...
“Focus on growing your list all of the time as newer subscribers are more engaged in adding to healthier open rates and ROI." |
The next step is to map out the content of your newsletter, the direction of what you want to showcase your subscribers.
- What action do you want your audience to follow through on when they get your newsletter?
- Are you looking for a sale, a social share, a conversation or what type of action?
Once you can identify that, you can pair the gaps you discovered here and start creating a strategy for your engaging newsletter.
Below are simple steps to kick off your email newsletter strategy
Step 1 Start with goal and purpose
Think about how a newsletter can improve and help your business. To determine this step you can interview your partners, yourself or even your staff then you should be able to answers this following questions:
What is my customer profile?
Why customers come to my business?
What are they expecting from us?
Prepare the answers to these questions and list the content that you created online via your different channel: social media, blog, interviews, website.
Step 2 set your editorial planning
After listing your online content you can think about some topics and headline of newsletters setting Email marketing and newsletter editorial planning. You should be able to send at least once per month articles, news product reviews and interviews. Remember something about the newsletter that is not a leverage to sale but it lets you inform your subscribers building trust.
Step 3 Kick off the newsletter
You can split your sending as following: 1/3 of the newsletter to company news, 1/3 relevant tips and best practices regarding your business, 1/3 highlight recent updates to your industry. In general, the content should encourage your customers to think about ‘’hey this company has a lot of great news and they are telling me how this thing can impact me’’
Anyway, offer a valuable content to your subscriber's building trust you should be able to gather all your content more easily than you think.
Keep in mind that 50% of emails are read and opened on mobile so keep it short, easy to read, with a single column and simple. Since you plan to send a newsletter once per month get involve an email marketing specialist and webmaster for creating your email template.
Step 4 Newsletter Tracking
Your email service provider should create complete reports to track each element of the newsletter such as click rate, open rate, link clicked etc. Analyse wisely the results to improve your future newsletter.
Step 5 Testing
Before sending out your newsletter, ensure to run a test of each part. You can test call to action, subject line, body content, personalization etc.