Start looking into ways of marketing your company online and you’ll see the usual suspects time and again: get a blog, be active on social media, optimise your website for Google. Some advocate starting a newsletter, but in 2021, it has become something of a minority recommendation.
We think that’s quite strange, because newsletters can be a great way of promoting yourself, mixing all the good parts of blogging and social media. So we thought we’d put together our best reasons for starting a newsletter: please read on.
1. It’s cheap
First up, it’s among the cheapest ways of connecting with customers. Most services let you get started for free, and only start charging when you hit a certain number of subscribers, which could be in the thousands. If you’re a B2B company, you might never need to pay, but even when you do hit the threshold, we’re only talking pennies per recipient.
2. It’s direct to the customer
What other form of marketing goes direct to an actual person, with their name on it, and is delivered straight to their inbox? Observe good practice with your timing, frequency, content and subject lines and you’ll keep your subscribers for longer, and that gives you great opportunities to market your products and services. Have a look at some tips for making better email newsletters.
3. You can tailor it to different customer groups
A “newsletter” doesn’t have to be one particular letter sent out to your entire subscription base. You can write several different ones, which can mean various optimised versions of a main theme, or completely different emails.
Why would you do this? It’s because all your customers are different. Some are regulars, some might have bought something once two years ago, others are lapsed regulars and some might have signed up but never made a purchase. You can tailor your messages to these different segments, offering introductory offers, loyalty bonuses and other personalised offerings.
4. It can drive direct sales
If you’re launching a new product, mention it in your newsletter and you’ll probably find that a percentage of readers follow the “read more” button, and some of them will go on to make a purchase – all from an email. Make sure your landing pages are all consistent, relevant and usable and you’re halfway there.
5. You can show your expertise and credibility
When news breaks in your industry, you can offer your expert opinion to all your subscribers. It shows you’re an authority on the subject and that you can be trusted to stay on top of things. It all contributes to the drip-drip of building an image of trust and credibility.
6. It’s trackable
You can put code in your emails that tracks users’ every interaction with the message itself, and then follows them onto your site and continues to let you discover how they act. Find out which emails were successful and which ones fell flat, and it all feeds back into greater hit rates in future newsletters and campaigns.
7. They can look great
Finally, don’t think of emails as basic text on a white background. All mail clients and web-based email services use the same code as websites – HTML – to render emails, so you can make them look interesting, professional, interactive and perfectly on-brand. Ask us how we can help with email design, as well as all the other aspects in the list above. We’re true believers in newsletters, and now is a great time to get started.
