Why Your Business Should Have A Newsletter & How To Get Your Sign Ups Soaring
If you didn’t know already, newsletters are an extremely valuable marketing tool used by ourselves as the business and also by our customers.
Have a think about when a new potential customer comes to your site you only have a few seconds in order to capture the attention before they could be gone forever. This means that developing your own strategy to attract new customers and retaining existing clients is crucial to successful and long-lasting marketing.
So, as a business, we know just how important it is to maintain contact with your customers once you’ve won them. Developing a newsletter program with a solid audience will prove to be a very important marketing asset for the duration of your company.
If you don’t currently have a newsletter, here are some reasons why you should consider changing this:
Email Newsletters Drive Sales
44% of email recipients made at least one purchase last year based on some kind of promotional email. It’s fairly easy to understand why email marketing is so effective when it comes to selling. When a recipient opens and views your email, you’ve got the golden opportunity to highlight a product, explain the benefits and connect them to a point of sale in moments.
People are pretty impulsive, and including an incentive such as a coupon, a special promotion, or even a call to action can be the impetus for the reader to actually take some action.
Connecting With Your Customers
Consumers receive more newsletters than person to person emails. While this may not be surprising to many of you, it was also found that this is because consumers want to receive commercial emails. When newsletters deliver really good content and follow email best practices, they help marketers measurably strengthen subscriber engagement and stay connected to their audiences.
Customers want to connect to the businesses and brands they are attracted to and genuinely like. Connecting to your customers in person is a matter of being personable, presentable and also professional, but all of that is easy to do via email as well. Your newsletter can provide great value, beyond sales, by informing your customers with interesting content that resonate with them.
But, how can you provide value, and why does it matter?
People don’t buy just because you are selling, they buy because they feel like they can trust you, are loyal to you and are fans of your business.
There are many different ways to build up that loyalty and connection via email. It could be a coffee shop’s newsletter talking about different beans and the best ways to prepare certain roasts. It could also be a B2B business sharing trade news of interest to their industry. If you’re informing while also selling, then you’re building a long-term relationship with your customers.
People don’t buy just because you are selling, they buy because they feel like they can trust you, are loyal to you and are fans of your business.
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You Can Boost Your Social Media Following
Salesforce released a blog post where they stated, emails that include social sharing buttons have a 158% higher click-through rate.
Social media channels such as Facebook, Twitter and Google+ are integral to your overall marketing and growth strategies. However, growing these channels can be the tricky part.
Email newsletters are highly effective for building your online community. By starting a conversation in the inbox, where engagement is generally more focused, and then finishing it in the social media arena, which will have higher reach, you’ll generate more activity on Facebook feeds and further beyond.
You Can Increase Overall Traffic To Your Website
If you want people to visit your site, sorry to burst your bubble but it’s simply not enough to hope that your customers will gravitate to your site organically. Your email newsletter plays an active role in both site traffic and sales too.
So, if you want people to stop by your site, browse your content and purchase your products then you need to invite, encourage and incentivize their presence. In order to achieve this such as including a strong call to action and ensuring your email is well targeted.
Creating An Email Newsletter Is Easier Than You Think
The biggest barrier to sending out email newsletters regularly is that a lot of people to view it as a bit of a chore. Crafting up a long, in-depth email newsletter is fine, but in more than most cases, it’s just unnecessary.
If you just have one goal in mind for your newsletter it’s then easy to build up from and stay on schedule, and you also avoid sinking far too much time into. Single-topic emails are an easy read to digest for your customers whether that being sending out monthly, weekly or even daily.
In researching email newsletter statistics and click-through rates. It was found that in over 90% of emails, it’s the very first link that gets clicked the most. Every subsequent link then sees a sharp drop off from the link prior. This will strongly imply that topics after your leading subject in an email are viewed as almost unnecessary. So, instead of creating a lengthy, time-consuming newsletter not only for you to create but for your readers to actually read, it’s best to send less content more regularly.
So, Now we know why you should be using email newsletters, we can now focus on what can you do in order to get your signs ups soaring.
Once you have created your must-read email newsletter that’s relevant to your target audience, the next key steps are to get people to actually subscribe to it.
Provide A Clear Value At The Sign Up: From your prospective subscriber’s point of view, ask, What’s in it for me? Then, let prospects know the overall benefits they’; get by subscribing to your email newsletters, such as quality content, industry updates, news, latest product information and also exclusive discounts.
Offer An Incentive To Subscribe: Consider providing a little extra motivation for subscribing. This could include bonus reports, white papers, tips from industry experts, webinars, or a contest with a prize that is relevant to your products and services.
Establish Credibility At Sign Up: If you have a larger list of subscribers, you could use that number to impress prospects. You can also demonstrate expertise in a field by including your certifications. Testimonials from already satisfied subscribers are another effective way to help build credibility.
Add A Pop-Up Form: When done correctly, pop-ups on your site can be rather effective for increasing email newsletter sign-ups.
Offer Multiple Email Address Capture Opportunities: In addition to including a sign-up form at the top right side of your website pages, provide email newsletter subscription forms and sign-up links in a wide variety of locations. For example, include them in the footer of promotional emails, in your email signature, at the end of blog entries and feature articles…also on invoices too.
Get The Information You Really Crucially Need: A name and email address. You can then later follow up with a demographic survey later on to get subscriber information to use for segmenting your email list.
Use Social Media: Create posts about the content that will be covered in upcoming email newsletters, as well as provide links to current newsletter content – on your social media accounts including Facebook, Twitter, Google+ and LinkedIn. In order to help capture those new subscribers, don’t forget to include a call to action that links to your newsletter subscription form.
Consider Contextual Targeting: Contextual ads can be an effective way to build a brands awareness help drive email newsletter sign-ups. Typically offered through such services as Google Adwords that will also be presented as banners or even sponsored URLs, contextual ads are very visible on websites or results from search engines that are related to the content you choose.
Test Your Subscription Forms: Set up A/B split tests in order to determine what works best for your target audience. For example, the copy, layout, call to action, colour etc can all be tested and changed in order to see what style works best in order to capture more email sign-ups.
Stick To Your Schedule: Whether it’s weekly, monthly or even bi-monthly, it’s important here to stick to a frequency that you can manage and easily maintain. Doing it this way means you will be able to remain top of mind with subscribers as they will be expecting to hear from you at certain times.
Persistence really is key to growing your list of email subscribers. Begin by producing a high-quality newsletter with decent and interesting content that will captivate your reader. Eventually, over time as your business grows so will your newsletter subscriptions so don’t feel too disheartened if you start a newsletter and only 30 sign up to it initially. These things take time but will be worth it in the long run.