10 Tips for Email Newsletters

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1st  February  2009 by Simon Wickenden

Online newsletters can be one of the most cost effective and lucrative marketing tools.

Email newsletters talk to all your clients past, present and future, updating your brand in their mind, building your reputation as an expert or leader in your field, plus creating and developing new relationships within the community.

Here are beebold.com’s 10 Tips for Email Newsletters:

1. Promote your brand far and wide but remember who your key audience is. Keep in touch and engage all your contacts, both existing and potential including those who provide referrals and repeat business. Always bear in mind who your audience is and what they are looking for it has to be relevant to them and make sure that there are short articles or links to larger articles in each edition that relate to all of your subscriber segments so that everyone finds something to interest them.
2. Add value with great content, got a particularly good offer or promotion? Promote it!
3. It isn’t all about you or your organisation. Think big - broader issues affecting your clients or industry, community news, industry information.. How can you make these relevant for your audience?
4. Don’t be afraid to promote yourself, this is the perfect place to spread topical or good news. If you have received any awards or testimonials mention them here! Use staff profiles, if they have recently retrained or joined the company let people know. Upcoming exhibitions or major sales and contracts should be promoted, a word of caution here be sure any clients are happy for you to promote your relationship with them before doing so.
5. Key to all this is the design and layout, if you have great photos use them. These help to break up the text - the ensuring that your email is pleasing to the eye and easy to take in.
6. Encourage your subscribers to pass your newsletter on. They are another form of advertising, so make it simple for them to spread the word by including a “send to a friend” button and links to “sign up”.
7. Ensure the spelling, grammar and accuracy are correct, proof read it repeatedly and  ask colleagues to check it, fact checking is important.
8. Keep it short, use summaries and link to additional information on your website or elsewhere.
9. Promote it aggressively, take advantage of every opportunity to sign people up. Print it out for exhibitions and collect email addresses, allow people to sign up online, include hard copies with invoices, make sure all your staff hand out copies all the time to anyone who is breathing, use the 10ft rule, anyone within 10ft of you should know what you do and how to get in touch with you. Promote in your windows, marketing flyers, vehicles, advertisements and listings.
10. Measure the impact and build from it.

 

This article has focused on what to do rather than how, if you need help and advice please contact us and we will be happy to help.

www.beebold.com
info@beebold.com

Contact Us via phone, (44) 01273 491259 or via our Contact Us page.