7 Reasons to Start a Newsletter and Grow Your Business
In one of my recent articles (37 Email Marketing Stats that Show Why Email is Still King), I mentioned that “90% of email gets delivered to the intended recipient’s inbox, whereas only 2% of your Facebook fans see your posts in their News Feed.”. While newsletters are no longer the latest hot topic, they are still proving to be a very important element of email marketing. Newsletters that are done right have a number of advantages.
The last thing you want a customer to think upon opening your newsletter is to question how it got in their inbox. It may sound obvious but it’s important that customers sign up to a newsletter with the intention of actually receiving it — whether t be for entertainment, online shopping, marketing or even customer account information.
No matter what your target audience or niche market is, creating a newsletter has never been simpler with many easy-to-use online programs that assist you for every step of the way and let you be as creative as you want. The key to a successful newsletter is providing engaging and fresh content in an appealing format. There are many online guides you can read to inform you on what makes an interesting and successful newsletter.
You can see an example of how a newsletter should be laid out through the screenshot below. However… it’s not just the layout and structure of your newsletter that matters, it’s the whole concept and how you approach it as a brand, while also being seen by your audience.
7 Quick and Effective Reasons to Start a Mailing List Today
In case you still haven’t dabbled in the world of newsletters and email marketing, here are just a few reasons to start.
Create Loyalty, Trust, and Community
The first thing about a business newsletter is the trust that you create with your network. Once the customer becomes used to your consistent and regular content, and as soon as they begin to recognize that content as informative and interesting, the more loyal they will become and be familiar with your brand name. Remember, customers need to trust you before they buy from you.
AutoResponders are Your Best Friend
When it comes to email marketing and mailing lists, few things are greater than the power of a solid autoresponder series.
Few brands do this correctly, but online marketers and bloggers have become masters at the process. The way it works is simple — someone joins your mailing list, and they are sent a series of mailings (based off your schedule). Each of these mailings are unique in their own way and helps build the relationship, trust, engagement and eventual conversion over the series of mailings.
The best part of this whole process is that you only need to create this mailing list series once. After that, every time someone new joins your mailing list, they will get walked through that same process (no matter when or where they came from).
Increase Website Traffic
One of the best ways to increase repeat traffic to your site is through the use of a newsletter or mailing list. Unfortunately, around 70% of the people that visit your site for the first time will never come back. This is simply a numbers game and isn’t totally relevant to your site content or call-t0-action… there is just way too much content already out there.
My recommended tip for heavily increasing the conversion rate on how many people join your mailing list once their hit your site, is to implement popup subscribe forms and welcome mats. Through my own experience, these have worked better than all other methods.
Boost Your Sales
With regular company newsletters, the opportunities to highlight a product or service are endless. Whether it be direct like an introduction to a new product, or a bit more subtle such as sharing a third party review of your service, it is easy to guide customers to your direct point of sales. Trust must be built first. Another idea to increase sales is to advertise special offers on the newsletter, therefore adding to value to it.
In addition to boosting sales, sending out a constant supply of mailings and messages to your audience will also increase their trust and desire to buy. It’s been reported that the average customer needs to see an advertisement for something around twenty times before actually making a purchase.
To learn more about how to increase sales with a newsletter, check out these sales funnel case studies.
Increase Your Social Media Engagement
Similar to websites, social media can be an overwhelming place for your content to be found. However, when someone is on your mailing list, it is more likely they would follow you on their preferred social network of choice.
For this reason, it’s extremely important to include all your social media accounts in all of your mailings. Providing the option to share newsletter content via social media will increase engagement across all your networks – this way, the conversation transforms from the more personal and focused medium of email to the more public and casual medium of social media. Also, if you already have a well-known logo or brand in place, be sure to keep this same branding consistent across your social media channels. This will play a huge part in the overall trust, branding and engagement process.
At the minimum, be sure to include your Twitter, Facebook, Instagram accounts within your mailings.
Distribute Important Content
One of the more obvious reasons to send out a newsletter is to keep your audience and your customer base up to date with all the company news. It is important that customers feel a part of this community that the newsletter has created.
To stress this point even further, I would highly recommend giving your “best” content only through your mailing list. This will serve you and your subscribers better in two ways; first being that you can incentivize the sign-up process with your best content, second being that your subscribers will actually want to stay subscribed to your mailing list — since they can clearly see it is your best work!
Remember… people join your mailing list because they want to get something out of it — make sure you are making it worth their time.
Track Your Signups
Most newsletter platforms provide an option to view analytics such as Aweber or ConvertKit. The analytics provided through these platforms generally include the sharing rate, click-through rate, conversion rate, bounce rate and list growth rate. Such statistics are useful for developing your newsletter strategy.
If you want to bring your outreach, management, and automation to a whole new level, I highly recommend you take a look at what GetResponse is doing as of lately. They are now focused on making the process of visitor-to-email-to-customer as seamless as possible, while also providing full reporting in the process.
Starting a Newsletter is Easy… Converting Your Audience is Not!
At the end of the day, anyone can start a mailing list — it’s extremely fast, simple and affordable. However, to find success with a mailing list, you need to have an audience and provide value to them in order to get them to actually join your list. Even then, the work is still not done.
To fund success with email, you must continually add value, split test your results, track conversions and measure ROI. Once you’ve mastered this process, you can aggressively market your site, landing pages and mailing list to levels you’ve never even imagined!
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