There are countless benefits of offering a newsletter to your fans, followers, clients and customers!

Business owners often ask me why they should have a newsletter, also referred to as email marketing.

Among the obstacles a business confronts is finding a cost-efficient way to market its brand to a wider audience. That’s where email marketing comes in.

Benefits of Offering a Newsletter:

• An effective email marketing plan is key to promoting and growing your business, making authentic connections with your customers, and potentially increasing revenue.
• They’re an important component of effective marketing and branding. Ignoring them can restrict brands from growth.
• They bring people to your website.
• It’s an inexpensive form of marketing.
• They take your brand marketing to the next level.
• They give your audience a broader picture of who you are.
• A newsletter opens the door to increasing a better understanding and knowledge of your brand and the products and services you offer. Facebook ads are not enough to reach potential customers due to the challenging algorithm

How do you capture contact info from your fans and followers?

• First, you’ll need to choose a newsletter provider and there are dozens to choose from. There are many programs to choose from and most offer “drag-and-drop” templates that make it easy to design beautiful, personalized, meaningful email campaigns.
  • MailChimp
  • Constant Contact
  • iContact
• You’ll then add a newsletter subscription “box” to your website’s home page, to your YouTube channel, to your Facebook page, you’ll post it on LinkedIn. You can add a pop-up sign-up to your website and Facebook. Add it to your social media ABOUT section. Place it after one of your blog posts. Did you like this post? Sign up and we’ll send you more awesome posts like this every two weeks. Link a sign-up in your email signature. Add it to your check-out page.
• Be sure to gather first name, last name, email address and some people ask for a phone number which they then use to send text blasts. When you create the subscription box be sure to add a compelling call to action: Join our newsletter for exclusive offers and discounts for subscribers only!

Treat your subscribers like VIPs

People who subscribe to your list are so interested in what you have to say that they’re willing to invite you into their inbox. This is a privilege.

Define your audience

No matter what you sell, you need to have a clear idea of who your audience is to effectively communicate with them. Newsletter programs allow you to identify segments of people within your audience so you can send them personalized emails that help increase engagement and generate greater ROI.

Decide what to write

Targeted campaigns have the potential to direct traffic to your store/shop/site/event/workshop and generate engagement/shares/sales. What do you want to say to your audience?

Be sure your content is a healthy balance of 90% info and 10% sales.

Here are some ideas of what to include in your newsletter content:

• A special offer. Lucrative offers will capture the readers’ interests, and they will jump into the content to read it.
• A giveaway available only to subscribers
• A download of the first chapter of your book!
  • One-up the competition with your sign-up offer by making it bigger and better. For example, if your competition is offering a 30-point cheatsheet checklist, make yours a 50-point cheatsheet checklist.
• Info about upcoming events, grand opening, workshop, class
• Recaps and photos from previous events
• Your most recent blog
• Details about featured or new products
• Feature a member of the month or a staff member
• Highlight a seasonal recipe
• Include info on the latest issues and trends in your market and industry research
• Include testimonials and Google reviews
• Offer a challenge: weight loss, 52 hikes, books
• Offer a free sample for visiting your location
• Mention a local business you partner with
• Reference pop culture and trending topics
• Funny joke, a recipe, a word search, or some way to ENGAGE your client, you’ll increase the lifespan of the email.
• Embedding helpful links and giving visual descriptions can attract more readers.
• Include Videos
• Referral programs
• Affiliate offers

Keep it useful

It’s good to think about which emails in your inbox you open and which ones you delete immediately when you’re creating your campaigns. What makes you want to open an email?

Use a compelling subject line

Most people quickly scan an email before they decide whether they want to open it, so your subject line must be compelling, enticing, unique.

Design Tips

• Most people are bombarded with emails every day, so keep yours to the point. Keep it simple but catchy
• Design the elements for your campaign in a hierarchy, putting your most important information toward the top.
• Include an engaging design; no one likes to be bored.
• Make your campaigns as easy to read as possible by using templates, legible fonts and obvious calls to action.
• Above all, you want everything in your campaigns to be clear and to the point.

Establish a schedule

• How often will you send your newsletter? Be consistent if you want to build relationships.
• Sent at regular intervals to maintain interest.

Test your campaigns

• Once you’ve designed your campaign, your gut instinct will probably be to click ‘Send’ immediately. Resist the temptation. Test your design.
• Not sure which subject line will get the most opens and clicks? Think there might be a certain time of day your customers are most likely to purchase your campaign? Running an A/B testlets you experiment with different versions of a campaign to see how the changes you make impact your results.

How can you grow your subscriber list?

• 60% of users sign-up for NL for offers and sales and because they like your brand. So, push it good.
• Give an instant offer to new subscribers.
• Restaurants: Restaurants have numerous ways of gathering data from their diners, including insights provided from third-party vendors like OpenTable or GrubHub; getting customers to sign up for emails on their websites; and surveys, like the offers printed on receipts from McDonald’s and Chick-fil-A, offering free food in exchange.
• https://optinmonster.com/73-proven-and-simple-ways-to-grow-your-email-list/
• https://www.wordstream.com/blog/ws/2014/08/05/increase-email-signups

Insights and Analytics

All programs give you insights into how your campaign performed so review them after your newsletter is sent. These insights are referred to as open rates, click rates, bounce rates and unsubscribe rates.

• They also allow you to create “click funnels” which is a simple process you can create within the program to re-target people who clicked on any of your calls-to-action.

There are countless benefits of offering a newsletter! Read through this again and begin to create a draft of your next newsletter. You’ll be surprised how fun and easy it is!

Jules Marie is the owner of 33 Words in Westcliffe, Colorado. Schedule a consultation today to ensure your next newsletter is on-point! SCHEDULE HERE!