What Exactly IS an Email Newsletter and Why Are They So Effective?

Let’s take a trip back in time for a minute…

Direct mail marketing was an incredibly popular and effective form of advertising before the advent of the internet. Companies would send out printed newsletters or magazines that would keep their customers in the loop about any developments with their business, coupons or deals in the near future, and a personally written letter. Today, mailed physical newsletters have pretty much disappeared, but they’ve been replaced by something that is potentially much more effective and powerful: digital newsletters.

Email Newletters
The purpose of your email newsletter is to provide your loyal customers with value. This could be in the form of content such as blog posts and infographics, or special offers or promotions unavailable to the average person. If your newsletter provides your customers with value, then they are going to look forward to opening it every week/month. If there is no real content and it is just filled with marketing jargon, chances are that they might put it in their SPAM folder or even the trash.

Creates a Deeper Connection with Clients
It can be difficult to keep up personal relationships with all of your clients. Forging deep, personal connections with your clients is incredibly important. If they feel like they know you, they will be much more likely to come back for repeat business. The problem is that you may not see them in person very often, and that lack of contact can degrade the relationship.

When you send out a weekly newsletter, you should include a personally written introduction, directly addressing all of your clients and customers. Even though it is technically one-way communication, from you to them, it can still strengthen the relationship as they may feel that you are talking directly to them.

Promotes Your Content
Creating new content for your website every week is a fantastic way to keep your site relevant and high in the search engine results. You should, of course, be sending it out using all of your social media channels to increase engagement. Newsletters offer you another method of sharing your new content with folks that are highly likely to engage with it: your already existing customers. You don’t need to include entire blogs within your newsletter. Simply tease it with the first paragraph or so and include a direct link to the blog.

Promotions
There are times when you want to be able to reward your loyal customers with promos that are not readily available to the average person. These promos could often be in the form of coupon codes that customers can put into the e-commerce section of your website. But how can you get these codes out to your customers? With a newsletter!

Having a weekly promo section with a product highlight is a great way to drive your customers to your website. Once there, they can use their promo code to buy your featured item, and maybe even other items while they are there!

Gives YOU Valuable Data
With the tools that your email marketing system provides, you will be able to see how many people opened your newsletter. This doesn’t necessarily mean that they read it, but that they were curious enough to at least open it. You can also measure the click rate, that is the customers who actually engaged with the newsletter and clicked on a link. You can then compare these two numbers and tweak your strategy.

After you’ve been running your newsletter for a while, you will have a database of valuable information about how your customers interact with it. With that data, you can start to continue to tweak your newsletter based on your best performing offerings and send times.

Actually Creating an Ezine
Here is the difficult part. Creating a newsletter template can take up an awful lot of time for an entrepreneur or small business owner.

A template of the newsletter needs to be created, with an attractive layout and style that will be consistent from week-to-week. Then your business’ branding needs to overlayed onto the template, to make sure that whoever is looking at the newsletter will know it is from your company. Then there is the content part, and this can be the most time consuming of all. You need to write a weekly intro letter, have new content like blogs every week, set up promos, grab testimonials and pretty graphics, and whatever else you want included in your newsletter. This can take up hours that you could be spending on more important tasks.

Or you could hire a virtual assistant to do it for you! I’ve set up hundreds of newsletters and I know exactly what works and what doesn’t. Together, we can figure out exactly what you want your newsletter to communicate to your customers and the best way to get your message across. I can take care of everything, from the graphic design aspects to the content creation. All you have to do is give it a look over to make sure everything is all set, and then we send it out!

In my free download, How to Use a Virtual Team to Grow Your Business and Get Your Life Back: Workbook, you can learn how teaming up with a VA can help you accomplish all of your goals, including getting your sales funnels up and running!

If you’d like to learn more about sales funnels, or any of our other digital marketing services, I’d be delighted to talk! You can contact me here for a free consultation. We can get started figuring out how to connect you with ICA, then guide them down your sales funnel until they are loyal customers!