Newsletter success is all about sales!
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...Dean Watmough, Managing Director of the ORCA Websites Franchise, offers some free advice to small businesses
We may be in the midst of the worst economic downturn in living memory, but there is another side to the credit crunch coin and its name is the Internet.
More and more small businesses are realising that the Internet is the lifeline they need to survive… and there’s no doubt that one of the best ways of connecting with customers is through a Newsletter campaign. “The most successful businesses are the ones who keep a database of their customers’ details and use it to proactively market their products and services to them,” explains Dean.
“Newsletters are effective for one simple reason: Customers like receiving targeted messages from companies they care about. They want to stay up to date on what you’re doing, they want to hear about new products and they want to hear about hot deals. The newsletter that lands in their inbox forces them to constantly be thinking about you.
“Adding a newsletter function to your website makes it quick, simple and practically free to build on existing relationships. Why wait? Building a strong business base now will pay dividends when the economy picks up.
“An effective newsletter is all about customer retention. It’s about building stronger relationships with customers who al-ready know you and decided that, yes, they want to keep hearing from you.
“Next, you need to start thinking like your customers; what do they want? What’s their mindset? Do they want to hear about your upcoming deals and special offers? If you can understand why they subscribed to your newsletter, you can meet their needs and help them to associate positive things with your brand. You want to get your customer out of their inbox and back onto your site. That’s the goal.
“Once you’ve done this you need to start thinking about segmenting your newsletters. You should already know quite a bit about your customers based on past actions and behavior. You can create separate newsletters with different content, to appeal to different types of customer. The more targeted your newsletter is to a customer, the more likely they are to listen to what you have to say!
‘”Don’t forget as well about writing high-impact subject lines. This is one of the most important steps to writing an effective newsletter because the quality of your subject line (the title) will determine whether it gets opened or not!
“Your newsletter also must have a clear call to action that will pique their interest and make them click through to read the rest of it and get the benefit. If no-one opens the newsletter, it doesn’t matter what gold is tucked away inside. They’ll never know. Your subject should only be about 6-7 words, but should inform, intrigue, excite and be compelling enough that they’ll want to know what’s inside.
“One thing that people often forget about when sending out their newsletter, is what is the best day to send it on? Things have a habit of getting “lost” on Monday and are ignored Friday and through the weekend. However, there may be a particular day that works especially well for you based on your industry.
“Test it and see. Try sending some campaigns on different days and times to see what combination provides the best results. You can even use our Statistics tools to see which days your website receives the most visitors and send out the newsletter accordingly.
