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A great newsletter is a terrific tool in your marketing mix. Why? Your prospects and customers have signed up for a subscription.
That’s right, e-newsletters have the potential to help you achieve top-of-mind awareness for your company.
If you handle your newsletter details correctly, you’ll get an excellent return on your investment of time and money. These are folks who want to learn about your company.
This means, of course, a weak newsletter strategy won’t work for you in your competitive marketplace. What you want is business growth, right?
Create a stellar newsletter with these 16 tips:
1. Get off to a good start by making sure you don’t raise any eyebrows by violating the CAN Spam Act.
2. Remember your goal is to forge a relationship with prospects and maintain your connection with your customers for repeat business. So be an attraction.
Forget the hard sell. Use a soft-sell approach with helpful information about your product or service capabilities.
3. The first thing you should write is an intriguing headline. It should serve as a roadmap to keep you focused and on track.
4. Your headline needs to contain keywords and words that convey action. Assuming your posting these articles on your Web site, this strategy will help boost its prominence with search engine optimization (SEO).
Follow the same practice if you prefer to use a subheadline.
5. If your newsletter strategy is to entice users to your site, write compelling lead paragraphs or summary followed by a “Read More” link so they’ll want to see the remainder of the piece.
If your articles aren’t published on stand-alone pages, strategize so your users will go directly to the spot you want them to go. This means inserting an anchor tag to jump to a specific location on a page.
6. For enhanced readability, separate topics in your article with subheads in boldface throughout your piece.
Bold subheads provide two other important benefits:
— They keep the attention of Internet users who prefer to quickly scan articles.
— Google gives priority to articles with bold subheads.
“People are in such a hurry to launch their product or business that they seldom look at marketing from a bird’s eye view and they don’t create a systematic plan.”
-Dave Ramsey
7. Use blockquotes for lengthy articles. (See the above example.)
8. For instant authoritative credibility, provide attribution when you cite research, studies or other information.
9. Insert links to the Web sites sources, so the reader will be inclined to trust your assertions. The links will also aid your SEO.
Be sure, though, to periodically monitor those links to other sites. Over time, many sources remove information from their sites. In effect, they expire. You’ll want your readers to find the information after they click on your link.
10. Use an economy of words – short sentences and paragraphs. In this day and age, remember your readers aren’t likely to be academics. Most readers like concise articles.
11. To entice readers to think about your writing, consider asking a few questions.
12. Insert your short bio or bios for other authors. People like to know the backgrounds of authors.
13. To attract readers surfing the net with keywords, insert up to 10 relevant tags on your site’s page. Separate them with commas.
14. Present an organized appearance – publish great content regularly at the same time or days of the week. Google gives preference to organized, excellent content.
15. Don’t forget to use relevant images.
16. Post your writing on relevant social media. For Twitter, hashtags work well. But but hashtags don’t work well on Facebook.
From the Coach’s Corner, here are related articles:
4 Best Practices to Enhance Your Google Rank with Content — There are four best practices if you want strong ranking from Google’s search rank algorithms, higher click-through rates and more social sharing from your content and press releases. That’s according to the Ranking Factors Study from Searchmetrics. The study shows the four practices improve message visibility and campaign results on the Internet.
Your Mobile Site: 7 Precautions for a Top Google Ranking — With the skyrocketing sales of smartphones and tablets, comes a warning from Google. If you don’t have a mobile site, you should. And if you do, make sure it has what Google calls “mobile friendliness.” Here are seven precautions to take.
“People are in such a hurry to launch their product or business that they seldom look at marketing from a bird’s eye view and they don’t create a systematic plan.”
-Dave Ramsey
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