Newsletters are a very important aspect of marketing for most businesses. Newsletters allow you to connect with your customers, foster relationships with potential leads, and increase your sales. You can ask just about any marketer today and you can almost guarantee that you will be told that you need a newsletter. That marketer would likely tell you to create an email list and put in serious effort to grow that list.
Think of an email list as a giant list of potential customers, previous customers, connections, people interested in your brand. Doesn’t that sound like a list you’d like to make as long as possible? Sending out regular email newsletters is key to growing and maintaining that list. But what is the real purpose of a newsletter? And how can it help grow your business? How do you get people to see it? Here are a few ways:
The Purpose of a Newsletter
While there are many purposes an email newsletter can have, usually the main purpose of a newsletter is to provide the contacts and customers on that email list with updates on your business, products, and services.
Your newsletter should come across as helpful, not pushy. Your newsletter should be something customers and contacts look forward to regularly receiving, not something they dread popping up in their inbox. This can lead to unsubscribers, which is never something you want. You should update regularly, but not too frequently.
Update when you have exciting updates, information, or new products or services. The main purpose of a newsletter is to keep customers updated, and develop a closer relationship with them. By corresponding through email, it can make the company-customer relationship seem more unique, leading customers to trust you and your company more, resulting in them making more purchases from you!
Although you may be updating them on your business or products, and you may want them to make a purchase from you, you don’t want to sound like a salesperson in your newsletters. The tone of your newsletter should be similar to the tone of a casual, interesting, helpful friend. If it feels too forced or formal, that can ruin the close relationship feeling you are trying to provide these customers with, the feeling that will prompt them to make repeat purchases from you!
Your newsletters should most likely not just be friendly emails to keep in touch. You want to use your newsletter to motivate your customers to take action in ways such as making a purpose, right?
While email newsletters are a great way to connect with customers, they also drive sales. According to several studies on the success of email newsletters, over 44 percent of email recipients made at least one purchase from the companies they received newsletters from.
It’s not hard to understand the science behind email marketing and why it is so important and effective when it comes to selling. Your email is the perfect opportunity to show a product, explain its benefits, and direct them towards a point of sale in a matter of seconds.
In today’s digital world, buyers are more impulsive than ever before, loving the ability to have things and purchase things with immediate ease. Including an incentive, promotion, or a call to action (“Limited quantities! Buy now!”) can be the push your reader needs to take that action and make a purchase.
How Easy Is It to Send a Newsletter?
One of the best parts of email marketing using a newsletter is how simple it is to do! By using a platform such as Mailchimp, ConstantContact, SendInBlue, and more, you can easily craft emails, save drafts, schedule emails, keep track of multiple contact lists, and save a backlog of previous email newsletters. These platforms make it easy to keep track of customers, contacts, metrics, and click through numbers! They also help you design an organized, aesthetically pleasing newsletter that customers will actually enjoy reading.
While these tools all usually have basic functions for free, for in depth metrics, you will often have to pay for a premium version, but don’t view your newsletter as an expense. It’s an investment. According to Experian, $1 spent on email marketing typically provides a return of $45 to $50.
Measuring the Success of Your Newsletter
The main necessity when measuring success in your business is a plan. When beginning newsletters for your business, you will likely spend the first few campaigns in a game of trial and error, figuring out what works and what doesn’t.As mentioned above, email marketing platforms often have metrics built in that can help to show what is working, and what isn’t. Things to pay attention to in these metrics include:
- How many people open your emails
- How many people click on links within your emails
- How many people unsubscribe from your list
Make sure you are checking these metrics after running each campaign, so you can see what adjustments need to be made before the next campaign, and where your changes are paying off.
Do You Need a Newsletter?
So, do you, as a small business owner, now believe that an email newsletter is a must have for you? If you still aren’t quite sure, let’s run through a rapid fire recap of what an email newsletter can do for your business.
The pros of having a newsletter:
- Connection with customers
- Increased sales
- Increase web traffic
- Boost your social media following
- It’s incredibly easy to set up an email newsletter!
Still not sure you have what it takes to set up a newsletter to help market your business?
Contact Us for help with email newsletters and all of your digital marketing needs!
