There are several benefits if you include e-Newsletters in your marketing mix. The most salient is that they’re a great way to achieve top-of-mind awareness with your prospects and to retain your customers.
Further, as a form of content marketing, they’re a favorite of B2B marketers.
Why? You can control your message and be a leader in your marketplace by cutting the through the marketing clutter with your very own advertising medium.
You need to connect with prospects and customers, and continually stay in touch with them. Typically, customers don’t buy until they receive five favorable messages about a company.
Once someone buys from you, e-Newsletters are unique as a tool to build customer loyalty in that customers have to opt-in to receive them.
In effect, they’re a form of permission-based marketing, which means customers want to hear from you.
e-Newsletters give you a competitive advantage for growth because of the multiplier effect.
For instance in a WordPress format, you can insert a social bookmarking service, such as Sassy Social Share.
With the social media and e-mail forwarding buttons, you can easily go viral.
It’s a cost-effective strategy. It’s affordable compared to other advertising options.
But remember to comply with the Can Spam Act.
Capitalize on your competition
If you’re a novice at this, research your competitors online. Pick an impressive Web site of a company in your industry that targets your ideal prospective customers, particularly a site that offers a newsletter signup.
Analyze why the newsletter is successful, and take notes for your later use – not to plagiarize or copy — but to use for ideas when you start your e-Newsletter.
Some of the big, credible companies have newsletters that include advertising. Consider buying an ad.
Note: Other than quality value propositions or benefit statements – why customers should buy from you – repetition is the key to success in marketing. Remember the “five favorable messages” principle?
And because you’re buying an ad in a newsletter from a company with a good reputation, you’re likely to gain automatic trustworthiness.
Launching your e-Newsletter
By launching your own e-Newsletter for which people sign up, you’ll start generating a list of prospects. You’ll be getting their e-mail addresses.
More on e-Newsletter benefits:
- They’re a marketing-clutter communication tool to increase your prospects to convert into customers.
- Your brand image is enhanced.
- Like your big competitors, you might be able to launch an additional revenue stream by selling ads.
Keys for success
Remember the suggestion to take notes from your competitor’s newsletters? One should be quality content. Excellent content is important to build trust. For more, see: 9 Content Traits of the Best Blogs.
This means you should include insightful, well-written articles authored by you or a trusted employee. Employees are a great source of information because they deal daily with customers and are more likely to be familiar with their chief concerns.
To save time and build your image, you can also accept pieces by guest writers. Even better, articles written by loyal customers and business associates would be a great feature.
You must also make certain to have a system to manage your list. You can get a great system via MailChimp, www.mailchimp.com.
Moreover, you can customize your approach with MailChimp’s designs, and get a simple analysis of your customers. You can leverage your social media, too.
If you try these ideas, good luck, and give us some feedback on your experiences.
From the Coach’s Corner, more strategies:
Want to Start an E-mail Marketing Campaign? 6 Tips for Small Business — There’s a reason why many companies launch e-mail campaigns. They realize sufficient returns on their investments. So, it’s a popular topic here at The Biz Coach. I’ve written about the latest trends in e-mail marketing, and why e-mail marketing goes better with social media.
5 Free Tools to Operate, Market Your Business — Are you on a really tight budget, but need to run and market your business? Ordinarily, I’m big on appearances – creating professional first impressions. But some free tools can suffice well.
Best Practices to Manage Your Global Brand, Web Reputation — As you no doubt know, the digital age has brought new challenges and opportunities. Best practices are critical in order to maximize your Web presence and to manage your online reputation. The key to Internet dominance is to think integration – naturally, the first steps include a quality Web site and synching it with your social media, business listings, inbound links and other elements.
The Key to Internet Dominance: Think Integration — Whether you’re a new or established business, it wasn’t that long ago that a strong Internet presence meant having a great Web site with a top ranking. Partially, that’s still true but the competitive marketplace continues to rapidly change daily, which means the No. 1 objective should be a vibrant, integrated presence.
“The aim of marketing is to know and understand the customer so well the product or service fits him and sells itself.”
-Peter Drucker
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