Business Interests »Tips, tricks, and advice
Quality marketing through newsletters
Milo Plurnbottom almost 2 years ago | 1 response    

Inspired by learning of the Conceptualize! Meeting News and Know-how newsletter from our latest community member, Annette Gregg of Concepts Worldwide, I decided to do some research on newsletters for business and discuss my views of newsletters.

In the age of rapid publishing through blogs, social networking, and syndicated content, the newsletter may not attract the same amount of subscribers as it once did, but does not make it any less important in your marketing tool kit.

Email Newsletters as marketing tool

It seems so obvious. Generate a mailing list, slap together some promotional info, blast your newsletter to inboxes around the world, and watch traffic and conversions rates go up. At a glance the digital newsletter appears the holy grail of affordable and effective marketing and lead generation.

Unfortunately many companies don’t get much farther than this. Many businesses simply put a mailing list form on their site under the impression that they are building a useful list of hot leads, without actually considering what value the newsletter is actually offering, and consequently, what message it is sending to the recipients.

While having a newsletter can be an invaluable tool in the growth of your business, there is more to consider than how many names are on your list.

Newsletter as confidence and trust builder

Providing a regular newsletter is an amazing way to demonstrate the expertise you and your company have to offer new and existing clients. There are very few, if any, industries where one company isn’t struggling against serious competition. Often times the offerings between rival companies are so identical right down to pricing, that potential customers are often choosing between which company they believe will do a better job of delivering. When cost and feature sets are not enough the customer will begin turning to other factors for making a purchasing decision such as branding and overall presentation, testimonials, and quality of support. Too often, companies overlook an obvious method of attracting and keeping customers: better content.

Good content, and a lot of it, not only helps improve organic search results and increase traffic, but begins the process of building customers for life who know and trust that your company doesn’t simply offer a product or service, but fully understands what it is offering and is willing to help their customers to understand it just as well. By providing a quality content rich site, you have more than a marketing piece, you have a valuable resource that people will refer back to over and over.

The newsletter is the logical extension of this. You have the content, you have the knowledge, and now you have the customers and visitors who are already using you as a trusted resource. Creating a newsletter is an easy way for individuals and other businesses to not only learn more about your company but have relevant and useful information delivered to them.

This is where the trust and confidence building comes in. When faced with similar companies, consumers and business purchasers will gravitate to the company that knows what they are talking about and can trust. Once your company has created a useful online presence that is attracting visitors, having a cogent newsletter consisting of more useful information than another ad in an individual’s inbox is a powerful message that you are organized, efficient, and willing to go the extra mile.

Making a useful newsletter

Nearly any half way decent newsletter will result in increased exposure. A truly useful and informative newsletter will result in real benefit to your business.

Consider the content

• What information is your newsletter offering that isn’t already on your website or readily available through other sources?
• Where can you expand upon and discuss in further detail information that does exist on your website or is discussed elsewhere but only in brief?
• Consult colleagues and your customers. What do they want to know? How you can you help them with your newsletter?
• Where is your current marketing lacking and how could you use the newsletter to reinforce those areas?
• If your company regularly presents at conferences or within trade organizations, take advantage of content and messages that you already have at hand
• Subscribe to newsletters from competing or similar industries

Do your research and strive to provide the most valuable resource in your industry. When considering content, be aware of the message and intention first, then begin thinking about format.

Consider the format

While it may seem an easy thing to put some information in an email with links to your site, it is a whole other thing to present a precise and effective newsletter that people are doing to read.

The format of your newsletter includes:

• Theme
  What “frame” are you using to present your information
• Style
  How the information will be presented
• Schedule
  When and how often will you send out the newsletter

The all inclusive newsletter or email blast

Picking the actual format and theme of your newsletters is vital. I found a few great examples of newsletter formats and themes from NAZCreative

• Tip of the Week
• Top Ten List
• Three Ways To…
• Before and After
• The Checklist

For more details on these formats see the original article How to Create a Successful Newsletter for Your Business at NAZCreative.

These formats represent what I would describe as the all inclusive newsletter. The entire message and content are presented within the email itself and should include some relevant call to action or invitation to visit your site. This type of newsletter gives immediate exposure and instant gratification, without mandating a visit to your site.

The advantage of this type of all inclusive newsletter is the time required to produce it is lessened and the commitment level of the reader is reduced. Also the expectation towards the type of content expected is altered, allowing for information presented in easy to create lists. In fact sending out in-depth articles in this way can be detrimental as it can simply overwhelm the recipient. Not everyone is interested in receiving a white paper in their inbox every week.

The cons include annoying your subscribers with too frequent and hollow communications. Be careful not to overextend your ability to create new original content. Better to publish less often than create weak content to make unrealistic schedules.

A more traditional newsletter or digest

Many companies opt to mimic the traditional printed newsletter, creating a virtual publication akin to a small magazine providing a much more resource rich and diverse resource. Indeed these same companies often publish a printed newsletter and the email version is an effective and affordable extension.

With a traditional style newsletter you are creating an online resource, presenting various articles and resources into a single issue. Here you can create more journalistic resources and explore topics in great detail without driving off readers, while still being able to take advantage of the list style formats of the all inclusive newsletter.

Extra care must be taken when publishing a traditional newsletter to ensure valuable content is being presented. A digest style newsletter implies that you have assembled a collection of articles and resources that are noteworthy and worth the subscribers time.

The newsletter you are emailing becomes more of an announcement or invitation to your newsletter. This style of newsletter cannot effectively share it’s entire contents in the email itself and therefore must be an invitation to view that cannot be refused. A concise email with snappy and informative headlines including brief and pertinent introductions that are easily scanned and digested with key points of interest will result in more readers. Use bold and bulleted text to draw attention to the most important elements that will entice the viewer. In some cases the email announcement of a traditional digest style newseletter might include the full contents of the lead article with headlines and links only for the other articles.

The advantages of the digest newsletter include a more substantive resource where various articles are brought together and reinforce the message. Where an email blast newsletter often hops from topic to topic, the digest should create a more solid and coherent presentation where every article in each issue should have some sense of overlapping utility.

The disadvantage of the digest newsletter is the increased commitment on the part of the subscriber. Because the content of the newsletter is typically at your site, it requires action from the subscriber to participate. Also the content expectations are going to be much higher requiring a larger commitment by your organization to create effective and useful content.

Consider the cost and time

Regardless of the format you choose, people often overlook the real costs of publishing a newsletter. While sending out a thousands or even millions of emails is a negligible monetary cost, actually producing the newsletter does.

• Who is going to manage and organize the newsletter?
• How much time is it going to take them to create effective content?
• What daily tasks will be impacted by the extra time spent operating the newsletter?
• What software or service are you going to use to manage subscriber lists and sending the newsletter?
• Are you buying content or paying authors?

When creating a useful newsletter the cost of time and resources from staff working on the newsletter or paying for professionally produced content is an important consideration.

For larger companies with devoted marketing teams this becomes much easier to manage, but for smaller companies where staff might wear different hats with overlapping duties, time and resource considerations become as important as direct monetary costs.

With simple planning and forethought however, a newsletter can prove an invaluable asset that your customers and potential customers will surely appreciate.

Archive the newsletter

Regardless of the format, or formats, you choose to use for your newsletters be sure to maximize their effectiveness by publishing them on your site. Create a resource library of some kind that are easily indexed by search engines and found by visitors to your site.

If you are publishing a digest style newsletter you could even consider a separate domain from your corporate or catalog site to house the articles, expanding your web presence and creating valuable cross linking between your domains. Creating a devoted domain for your newsletter has the advantage of increased search engine exposure and streamlining your user interface and navigation to keep pages focused and lean. Be careful though not to present duplicate content between the domains or confuse visitors if you choose this route. Make sure to create a seamless experience and brand continuity between the sites.

Now you’ve got a newsletter…where are the subscribers?

I found a handy list of tips for increasing subscriptions to your newsletter at businessknowhow.com. Below are few of those tips:

• Make a subscription form a prominent feature of your website
• Put a subscription box on every page of your website
• Ask people to subscribe to your newsletter mailing list when they complete a purchase
• Ask current subscribers to forward your newsletter to their friends
• Promote your newsletter at seminars and talks
• Promote your newsletter in your elevator pitch
• Link to past issues in each newsletter
• Offer a free gift
• Encourage colleagues and friends in your industry to talk up your newsletter
• Never stop soliciting subscribers

For more details on these tips of getting subscribers see the original article 17 Low-Cost Ways to Get Newsletter Subscribers at businessknowhow.com.

And from my personal experience, I would add that making the subscribe and unsubscribe process as simple and obvious as possible. I am far more inclined to join a newsletter mailing list if I feel confident that I am not going to be stuck in a spam cycle or unable to easily get off the list.

Blogs, RSS, and social networking…Beyond the newsletter

If your business or site provides regularly updated informational content, syndicating your content via RSS is a great way to take advantage of content you are already creating for your visitors without the added time and expense of a devoted newsletter. Not only does providing an RSS feed of your content mean that individuals might be reading your website regularly from the convenience of their RSS reader, but that RSS feed can be submitted to places like Technorati for increased exposure. And if you are publishing a newsletter it should definitely be accessible via RSS as well as on your website.

The blog has in some respects taken over the role of the newsletter. The revolutionary ease of publishing information through a blog has changed how people get information and news. Like the newsletter, a well written, focused, frequently updated blog can be invaluable. The key difference and disadvantage is that while providing useful information, it does not require the reader to share any information with you. Even where your blog inspires ongoing dialogue through comments and responses, the tact of putting people on mailing list who give you their email address to post a comment is different. Blog participants are not necessarily consenting to be on your mailing list, and if you want to build a mailing list this way take extra care to not make people feel tricked into signing up.

Social networking offers whole new opportunities for connecting with people both in a group setting and one on one. Nearly all social and professional networking sites have some means of communicating to the group as a whole. Content that you might have previously used in newsletters is often appropriate and welcome in this environment and has the added benefit of acting as free advertising while providing direct networking opportunities.

Quality is still king

In the end, regardless of what methods you use to communicate with existing and prospective customers, the quality of the communication is preeminent. Simply creating a newsletter and building a mailing list might get you traffic and leads in the short-term, but better content will bring people back. You have more options and opportunities than ever before to interact with and introduce yourself to the marketplace. Take advantage of it by offering something of value that your visitors will truly appreciate and they will reward you with word of mouth promotion and loyalty.