An email newsletter can be a great way to promote your business and build lasting relationships with your customers. A study found 42 per cent of businesses say that email is a powerful lead generation channel, and 88 percent of B2B email marketers say email is still the most effective method to boost business.
There’s no question that email marketing is useful, and newsletters are a great way of reaching out to customers in a seamless way.
Here are a few easy tips to keep in mind when your company decides to launch its own newsletter.
Choose a Reputable Program
Naturally, you want to go with one of top email marketing platforms out there. These programs make it easy to design a slick newsletter, manage your contact list, and monitor your metrics. Check out this article for a comprehensive round-up of what’s available.
Know Your Customers
Before launch, you need to learn more about your average customer. Take some time to think about what they want, and where they are likely to hang out online. Do they favour discounts over new product sneak peeks? Are they younger and more Twitter savvy? By tailoring your newsletter to what your customers enjoy they will be more likely to sign up and turn into paying customers.
Provide Useful Info
Time is a valuable commodity, so your customers appreciate it when you don’t waste theirs. Offer useful information and they will stay loyal to your company and continue reading your mailings. Tell readers about important hires that will help your business achieve its goal. Highlight useful blog posts. Include any press you received recently, and don’t ignore social media recognition. Don’t write lengthy newsletters; everyone’s attention span has been shortened due to the amount of emails we receive daily.
Avoid Ad Copy
Have you ever come across an email that sounds so promotional you don’t even want to open it? Avoid subject lines with content such as “Click here for a great deal!” or “Once in a lifetime opportunity today!” Using too many exclamation marks will make your newsletter look immature and spammy, and will give readers the impression there’s no editorial value to your newsletter.
Include a Call to Action
You must enable customer engagement. Towards the end of every mailing incite readers to take some sort of action or make a purchase. For example, tell them to take advantage of a limited time offer, or you could ask customers to share your content on their social networks.
Here are some examples of excellent newsletters to show you how it’s done. Employ some of these tips and your conversion rate should increase dramatically.
Flickr photo via user psd
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Excellent points, all, and they hold true whether the business is a neighborhood hardware store or a multinational law firm with a roster full of FP500 and Fortune500 companies.
I don’t know a lot about product marketing but in the B2B service sector – where it is difficult to drive visitors to a website – I’ve found it’s useful in a newsletter to highlight recent blog posts or articles posted at the website with just a headline and a two sentence summary of what the piece is about with a link to the full version. This way, busy managers and executives can find items of specific interest to them and be able to read only those items without having to scroll through a lot of irrelevant information.
The most valuable tip you offer is “avoid ad copy.” Nothing will turn off people on the mail list faster than being bombarded with self-promoting e-mails because they don’t care about some deal you closed for another client or that the firm won an award they never heard of. I may be an exception but I’ll opt out of emails from businesses that use e-mail just to tout their own accomplishments.