Email marketing is a fast, efficient way for small businesses to connect with their customers. Sending e-newsletters has become an increasingly crucial way to build customer loyalty through special offers and great, engaging content, and ultimately is another tactic to drive sales to your small business. I always advocate a 360-degree approach to your marketing initiatives, which means tackling each one from every corner that makes sense, such as print business flyers, social media posts, email newsletters, blogs and more.
But how to send killer eNewsletters? That is the question. While email marketing can be a great marketing tactic, it can also hurt, or do nothing good your brand, if you are sending out eNewsletters that your customers really don’t care about; if you are sending them out too frequently that they become annoying; and if they are perceived as too sales-y all the time. The following are 10 tips on how to send killer eNewsletters that will make the greatest impact on your customers and business:
- Keep your subject line straightforward and related to the content in your email. Cutesy subject lines (somewhat surprisingly) don’t resonate with customers. They want to know what they are getting if they take the time to open your email. Test out different types of subject lines to see which ones are garnering the best open rates (how many people open your email newsletter) with your customers.
- Think through the purpose. Where is it that you want them to go and what is it that you want them to do? Make your message clear so that they can get there and do it!
- Make the information relevant. This might seem obvious, but keep telling yourself this when you’re writing the content.
- Resist focusing only on sales. As we mentioned briefly above, a sales-centric message can be a real turnoff and can lead to your recipients hitting the ‘unsubscribe’ button. Instead, mix up your messaging with news, expert tips and promotions.
- Short and sweet is the way to go. Give customers small nuggets of compelling info and allow them to click through for more information on your blog or website or social media sites if they are interested in learning more. They should be able to scan your content and easily pick out the pieces that they want to read, or not.
- Break up the content. Piggybacking off of my last point regarding making your eNewsletters scannable, another tip is to make sure to include catchy subheadings on your “stories” (pieces of information) that further make your content accessible to impatient eyes (your customers are busy and want to find any takeaways really quickly).
- Always include a call to action. It REALLY does motivate people to do what you want them to do.
- Build your contact list over time. The best contact list is a quality one, full of people who are really interested in your business and hearing from you. So, try not to focus solely on numbers and capturing lots of email addresses with people behind them that might not care to be connected with you. Quality over quantity.
- Target your list as much as possible. If you can maintain a master contact list and then break that list down by types of customers, that’s ideal. For example, perhaps one eNewsletter is only relevant to new customers (those who have signed up for your newsletters, but haven’t booked your services yet) and another eNewsletter is relevant to current/old customers — the more targeted you can make your list, the better, so they aren’t getting information that isn’t relevant to them.
- Use your customers. Out of ideas? Tap into your customer base to find out what they want to hear about. Always provide an incentive when you’re asking customers to “work” for you, such as a free t-shirt, pizza pie, tickets to a show in town, custom pens or something else.
Have you found success with your company eNewsletters? Let us know how it’s working for you. Leave a comment below, or connect with us on Facebook, Twitter or Google+.
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