3 Tips To Marketing With Newsletters

In any business, top of mind awareness is critical to keep ahead of your competition. Using newsletters in your marketing mix is a great way to keep in touch with customers and prospects alike. Using newsletters in your marketing allows you to communicate with your customers on a regular basis by educating them, sharing great useful information with them and announcing any new products, services or specials your company has on a timed schedule.

You will have to decide if you want a printed newsletter or an electronic newsletter (or ezine). Though printed newsletters are more costly than electronic newsletters you might want to look at adding this in to your budget as you will get a much higher return and open rate from a physical printed newsletter than an ezine.

Ezines are great because there is no print cost and you can automate the process quite easily. It doesn’t cost any more to do a full color ezine than a plain text ezine which is great. They also can be delivered automatically and you don’t have to worry about postage costs along with print costs.

Either way you go, you do want to keep some basic tips in mind to keep your viewers reading your newsletter on a regular basis and to get the most out of it.

#1 It’s not a straight sales pitch
You want to make sure that this is something that your customers look forward to reading. Keep it educational and informational. Don’t make it boring. Adding information about your company is great but be sure to add value to it.

Educational “How-to” articles are a great way to add good solid value to your newsletter. Adding information about what’s going on in your company is ok, but be sure ot add good content that will interest your readers too.

#2 Keep it consistent
Be sure to set a schedule and stick with it. If you send one newsletter and then don’t send another one for 4 months, then people won’t expect it and are less likely to pay attention to it. At minimum, you should be having a quarterly newsletter.

It is best to have it monthly so people will expect it. Plus, do you really want to stay out of touch with your customers for three months at a time? Think about going on a date. If you like the person you went our with, do you wait 3 months to call them again for another date? Same principles apply here.

#3 Getting Good Content
It really is best if you write the content yourself or at least hire a ghostwriter to help you with the content. You can even find a journalism student that you can hire as an intern to help out. You just provide them with the topics you want articles written on and then let them go to town finding the research and writing the article.

If you really are stuck, you can also pay for pre-written content. I don’t like this one personally but many people have used it very successfully. You can pay a service to give you articles and other content for your newsletter. All you have to do is add your logo and contact information to their newsletter.

There you have it. The basics for adding a newsletter as part of your marketing mix. Remember that it isn’t about selling in your newsletter. It’s about education and keeping your customers and prospects up to date on what’s going on.

You’ll build better relationships with your customers and they will be much more likely to remember you when they need your services or products again in the future.