Ah, the ever promising email newsletter. What exactly is a newsletter, though? And why is it important to have one? In this day and age, having a newsletter is a necessary component for your business’s web marketing campaign.
There’s some key steps you should consider when setting up a successful email marketing campaign. Among them are making your text easily scannable for readers, ensuring information is properly presented in small “bite-size” sections with links to read the full article, and keeping the majority of the newsletter’s content “above the fold” or visible without having to scroll down.
Next, you’ll need an audience. Be up front and have a clearly viewable link to your email newsletter sign up form on your website. Drive signups by offering incentives to newsletter subscribers. What will make it most worthwhile for them are special promotions. Take it a step further and offer specials for folks who refer new subscribers. Gather emails from past and present clients, events, and through good old fashioned networking. You can advertise your newsletter on fliers, stickers, price sheets, or any other sort of print collateral you use.
Plus, you should also promote your latest newsletter when it first posts. It’s smart to tweet a link to your newsletter, or to post it to Facebook. And finally, respect your audience by allowing them to unsubscribe at any time and protecting their contact information.
We highly recommend using an email newsletter service provider to help manage your newsletters and email campaigns. One such service is MailChimp, the one we use here at clickbooq. Our experience with them has been excellent and they provide lots of templates and tips to help you get started plus great reports for measuring the success of your newsletters.
Here are a few helpful links to guides you can download for free from their site:
1_ MailChimp Guides: How To Create An Email Marketing Plan, Email Marketing Field Guide, and Common Rookie Mistakes.
2_ Email Blueprints: email newsletter templates that are easy to use and have intuitive modifiable fields so that you can tailor it to your own branding and content.