I’ve showed you the benefits of having your own email newsletter and given you a list of companies to help you produce and email your newsletters to your prospects, but the following few tips will help tie everything together and get your newsletter off to a great start.
Once you’ve signed up with an email service provider, they should walk you through the process of assembling your first newsletter and creating a signup form. This form is what visitors to your website will use to ask to opt-in to receive your newsletter, and you should place it front and center on your website – somewhere difficult for anyone to miss.
Along with a signup form, you should also offer an incentive of some sort to encourage people to join your newsletter and tell people about the benefits they receive from hearing from you on a regular basis.
Depending on the types of products or services you offer, you could offer to give people a free product or service – or if you don’t offer any inexpensive items, you could enter subscribers into a prize drawing and give one valuable prize to someone on your list each month. The most popular incentives I’ve seen though, are those that are inexpensive to produce and deliver but have a high perceived value, like a free special report, CD or DVD.
Think of the most common questions you get asked in the course of doing business and if you can answer them in a short report or video presentation, this is something your website visitors will appreciate and will help you to get people on your email list. Give your special report or other giveaway an intriguing title like “5 Secrets to Choosing the Best ______ “ or “5 Critical Mistakes to Avoid When Hiring A ______” and experiment with different titles to see which inspires more people to signup for your list.
It’s also a good idea to be specific and let people know just how often they’ll be hearing from you. I’d encourage you to test and see what works best for you, but I think contacting your list once every week or two weeks is enough to keep your name fresh in minds without them thinking that you’re bothering them constantly. At the very least you could get started emailing them on a monthly basis, but if you let it go longer than that, people can quickly forget about you and won’t think to call you when they have a need for your product or service.
I’ve also found that including a link to your website privacy policy, a document that spells out exactly what you will and won’t do with information they give to you, can reassure people and encourage them to signup for your newsletter. You can find out more or create a free privacy policy of your own at sites like www.freeprivacypolicy.com – but if you have a smaller more basic site, just a small line of copy placed below your signup form like “We respect your privacy and will never share your information with anyone at anytime” should suffice.
Now before we wrap up this segment on email marketing, I want to leave you with a few ideas about some things you can talk about in your email newsletter. Remember that the only reason prospects and customers will read a newsletter is because they’re expecting to learn something from you. They’ve given you permission to contact them but they won’t stay subscribers for long if all they get from you is sales pitch after sales pitch, so I usually recommend about an 80/20 or 90/10 ratio of valuable content to advertisements for your own products or services.
While you can of course educate them about new products or services or yours, I find that helpful tips about how to best use and benefit from the products or services subscribers may have already purchased are really appreciated. Tell your list about different ways to use your products/services or even better, put together a video tutorial to answer some of the questions they have about them.
You can of course educate them about new items or special sales too, but you should always try to provide value to them in some shape or form which will take you closer and closer to making a sale with prospects who are still unsure about you.
Case studies or testimonials are also excellent topics to write about, because it shows people benefiting from the use of your products or services and helps reinforce the idea that you’re the expert in your field that they should be doing business with. I also enjoy reading about the people behind the companies I do business with, so maybe once a month you could profile the great employees you have and introduce them to your customers.
I hope you’ve found this short series on email marketing helpful, and next time I’ll share some valuable tips about how to use the 80/20 rule to increase your productivity and profitability.
Written by Steve
Topics: Online Marketing