The Newsletter: A Digital Marketing Secret

Newsletter:

Newsletters are frequently overlooked as an important part of digital marketing to generate additional income. The first question that most people ask is, “How do you make money with a newsletter?” While the explanation is simpler than you might think, there are a few things that you’ll need to do to be successful with this form of email marketing. We are going to share some simple newsletter tips to increase your sales.

Making a profit is the obvious objective of any business adventure. When people subscribe to your newsletter or some other publication, there are generally two understandings. The first is that you will provide them with good information relative to the intended topic. The second is that by using this form of digital marketing, you are hoping to somehow convert that information you provided into earnings. This may sound simple enough, but it’s easier said than done. As anyone will truthfully tell you, making money online isn’t exactly easy or quick. It will take some work and some time. But as the saying goes, “Anything worth doing is worth doing well”.

What is a Newsletter:

In the most basic sense, newsletters are a document that shares updates with a group of people. However, the newsletters that we’re talking about here are a form of online marketing, or more specifically email marketing. A newsletter is in the form of an email that shares key information with your customers and prospective customers for the purpose of building trust, and ultimately increasing sales.

These types of newsletters are generally sent out to a list of people who have opted to receive them. The frequency can range from weekly to monthly. If the frequency is any shorter, the customers can feel inundated and ask to remove themselves from the list. Any longer than a month, and they can forget about you, and you risk them going with your competitor the next time they need that type of product or service.

Why Newsletter:

The newsletter is one of the most effective channels for marketers. It is a way to grow their brands, provide information, and create community. In the age of information overload, it’s difficult to keep up with all the information that’s available at your fingertips through the internet. Fortunately, because newsletters are emailed directly to the inbox of your target audience, it can help you cut through all this noise and provide a concise update on what’s going on in your business.

“Email has an ability many channels don’t: creating valuable, personal touches – at scale.”

David Newman

How to Create a Newsletter:

With a good newsletter, some key elements should always be included and considered for it to be an effective form of digital marketing.

1. You need a killer email subject line That will get your readers’ attention
2. Great content that your customers will find useful.
3. A well-designed newsletter template
4. It shouldn’t be too long. The appropriate length will vary depending on your product and industry.
5. Adjust the focus of your newsletter to the mindset of your target customer. Don’t just write information for the sake of writing information. Consider what your target customer will want, or rather need from you.
6. Every good newsletter should include at least one call to action. This call to action invites the reader to do something. It could be to click on a link to visit a website, or it could be to buy something.
7. A quality email list of individuals that are interested in your products and information.

It’s important to note that missing any one of these things risks losing both your credibility and causing your customers to delete it from their email before reading it, or worse, unsubscribe from future distributions.

As mentioned above, the understanding of your newsletter should be to do two things.

1. Provide the recipient with good information relative to the intended topic.
2. That you will somehow be able to convert that information exchange into additional income.

We talked about the first item above. Now we’ll explore the second.

Start by asking yourself what your goals are for the newsletter. If you’re trying to promote your products, then your newsletter should highlight your products and their benefits, offer discounts or promotions, and provide links to the items on your site.

If you want to increase customer loyalty, then your newsletter should feature articles that show the company’s commitment to building quality relationships with your customers.

A good newsletter will contain interesting content that is relevant to the company’s audience. It will be customizable to make it easy for readers to read and digest the information.

A good way of ensuring that you get the most out of your newsletter is to make it personal and focused on human beings rather than just numbers or statistics.

Some tips to ensure you create a good newsletter are:

• Before creating your newsletter, think about what you want it to accomplish. What do you want the audience to know after they read it?  
• Use relevant and varied “call-to-action” phrases at the end of each email. These phrases should be tailored for different audiences and lead them to take specific actions, such as signing up for an event, downloading content or making a purchase. 
• Keep your subject line short and concise. It should tell readers quickly what they can expect from reading this email without having too many words or too many details.
• Add images where appropriate.

A good newsletter also builds on customer loyalty. This is key to a company’s success. One way to build customer loyalty would be to include articles that show the company’s commitment to your customers their community, or their interests in each and every newsletter sent out. This will help build trust and strengthen connections between the customers and the business.

“On average, 8 out of 10 people will read your headline copy, but only 2 out 10 will read the rest.”

Brian Clark

How to Design Newsletter Templates:

There are some steps that will need to be addressed to effectively design a good newsletter template.

1. Define the objective of your newsletter. Are you building customer loyalty, trust, credibility, selling a product or service?
2. Define who will be receiving this newsletter. Is it a specific demographic? Once you know who your target audience is, you can better determine what type of message, layout, images, and products you need to include in your newsletter.

Once this is identified, the email can be put together.

Structure – The structure of the newsletter will vary depending on your needs and what you want to achieve. Some considerations when designing the structure of your newsletter are:

• The design should be clear and appealing (try not to overwhelm the reader).
• The copy should be concise (avoid wordy sentences).

Images – Since the attention span of the average reader is less than 8 seconds, Images are critical to capture the reader’s attention.

Content – Keeping in mind this is a form of digital marketing, the objective of your newsletter, your content should quickly capture their interest while also being short and concise. Typically, this is done by breaking multiple articles into small easy-to-read sections that give only a teaser, then lead the reader to your website for the rest of the article. Once their attention is initially captured, the average reader’s attention span for a newsletter is usually around 5-7 minutes. So you’ll want to break up the different segments on your newsletter to make sure they can get all the information you are trying to convey much quicker than that amount of time.

Once you have created a newsletter that works well with your target customers and gets good results, it then becomes your newsletter template, that you can then use to model all of your future newsletters off of.

How to Write a Newsletter:

According to research, the average attention span of a reader is 8 seconds. This means that they will only spend 8 seconds looking at your newsletter before deciding to click off. But if you capture their attention within that time, then you may have at least initially succeeded with this form of online marketing. How much time they spend on this newsletter entirely depends on what you present them with. Emails and newsletters are typically longer than other types of content, so people are generally willing to spend more time reading it than if they were looking at something short like an advertisement or social media post.

If you don’t have someone that writes good concise content, don’t be discouraged. There are some amazing options available to small business owners these days. One key example includes AI (Artificial Intelligence) tools like Rytr that can quickly generate content for newsletters and a wide variety of other content-related applications. Both the quality of the content and the pricing of these resources are surprisingly good.

When writing your newsletter, keep in mind that a newsletter is a personalized, one-way communication with your customers or subscribers. It’s an email that is sent to an audience on a regular basis to keep them informed about your company’s latest news, products, and services.

It’s important to understand the benefits of newsletters versus other forms of marketing communications like blogs, social media posts, or advertisements. Newsletters are more personal than other types of communication because they often don’t include logos or branding. They also provide more information because they are longer than most social media posts.

This type of communication is primarily intended for customers who want more information about your company and who want to learn about offers and promotions before anyone else does. It can have a significant impact on customer retention rates if it’s done correctly.

“Make the customer the hero of your story.”

Ann Handley

Newsletter Ideas:

As mentioned above, there are a number of reasons you would want to send out a newsletter. To help get those creative juices flowing, we’ve listed some newsletter ideas below:

1. Establish trust, credibility, and/or brand loyalty with your new customer prospects.
2. Further Build trust, credibility, and/or brand loyalty with an existing group of customers.
3. Announce a new product, service or event to your target audience.
4. Promote a sale or promotion to your target audience
5. Request your targeted group participates in a servey.
6. Share your companies philanthropic activities… this is similar to building trust above.
7. Drive traffic to your website, blog, podcast, or some other online destination.
8. Distribute coupons or discount codes
9. Gauge the level of interest your customers might have in an upcoming product or service.

The Newsletter should be considered part of your sales funnel. If you’re not doing a newsletter, you’re leaving money on the table.

The best time to send your newsletter is immediately after someone has purchased from you or has given their contact information. This maximizes the chances that they are still in a high-engagement state, which makes it more likely that they will read your email and take the necessary action.

Building Email List:

As discussed above, an email list is an important part of any business. When done properly it can be both an important tool to generate repeat traffic and a tool to help you to stay in touch with your customers. You can leverage your email list to promote your products or services or do some other marketing techniques like sending out discounts and coupons.

There are a variety of different ways to build email lists for your business. Some particularly good tools to help you in this effort include GetResponse (see video above), ActiveCampaign, and EmailOctopus. Both of these tools provide a full suite of tools to help you do everything from creating your email list to managing your newsletter distribution. You can also create a newsletter by manually sending out emails once in a while with information about just your products or services.

Some of the more popular options to build your email list include using social media platforms such as Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Pinterest, Instagram, and so on. Another way is by adding subscription forms on your website or blog to collect the email addresses of people who are interested in your product or service. This allows visitors who are interested in what you have to say the opportunity to subscribe.

Conclusion:

According to the experts, there’s no question that newsletters are an important and effective way to help build your company and its brand. Most businesses have already been collecting email addresses from their customers. So now it’s just a matter of how you’re going to use them.

For those companies that haven’t been collecting email addresses from their customers, it’s a good time to start. And with the variety of tools and methods mentioned above, there’s really no excuse anymore.

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In future articles, we’ll be providing critical details on each of these topics listed above, and a variety of other topics specific to making your small business successful, so make sure to subscribe to our newsletter so you can be notified when they are released.