Newsletters are a classic means of staying front of mind with customers. Especially during the pandemic, an emailed newsletter represents one of the few direct communications that companies are able to maintain with their target audiences.
According to Hubspot, roughly 80% of marketers reported an increase in email engagement over the past 12 months, and a 2019 study found that small business owners ranked email marketing as the second most effective medium – behind social media – for building brand awareness.
Email marketing continues to be a powerful tool in every marketer’s arsenal, but like any other tool, it’s only effective if used properly. Below, our tips for ensuring that your newsletter delivers.
1. Be consistent
The up-front investment of time and resources required to develop an initial newsletter template will pay dividends down the line as it can be repurposed, with fresh content each time, and blasted out at regular intervals. Be creative with your email design and content and consider a call to action for each edition. Once you’ve established a look and feel and decide how frequently you’ll send your newsletter, you’ll want to stick with your plans as much as possible. Readers will know what to expect and when to expect it.
Not only can you set expectations so that people will subscribe to your email, but you can segment your email campaigns based on subscriber interests. And, don’t be afraid to test new approaches to see what resonates with your audience. Ideally, you will cultivate an audience that looks forward to receiving the content monthly or quarterly, depending on the cadence that you establish.
2. Be a thought leader
As you consider the content for your newsletter, a good practice is to weave in industry updates and recommendations for what your customers might want to prioritize. For example, a sanitation company could share business trends and guidance on keeping workplaces safe, or a cereal company could publish the latest developments on heart-healthy diets and other nutritional tips. This gives you an opportunity to be positioned as a subject-matter expert, and a reliable source of relevant news and information.
This is also a means of establishing trust among your audiences. A study conducted by the MIT Sloan School of Management suggests that trust in a company affects the amount and frequency of customer purchases.
3. Be helpful
Each customer or client you have now probably came to you for one specific issue or need. In fact, every time you sell a service or product, you have a 60-70% chance of selling to an existing customer, while the success rate of selling to a new customer is 5-20%. So your newsletter gives you the opportunity to highlight additional products and areas of expertise to a customer base that is already interested in your company.
In a company newsletter, you can also share case studies, company awards, employee profiles, blog posts and news clips– all of which help your customers see you as one of the leading companies in your field and the one most likely to have solutions.
“Investing in a newsletter today will lay the groundwork for growth tomorrow and beyond.”
Conclusion
Developing an effective company newsletter takes careful planning and a commitment to provide valuable content on a regular basis. Every issue of a thoughtfully crafted email newsletter allows companies to stay connected and build trust with their customers, cement their reputations as subject-matter experts and thought leaders, and highlight different aspects of their business. If your company is not already doing so, investing in a newsletter today can help keep your customers engaged and lay the groundwork for delivering growth tomorrow.