Newsletter Not! – Have You Really Got News For Them?
It’s your company newsletter time again! Unless you’ve got something really new, interesting or relevant to announce, is there any point sending them?
Ensuring long term company awareness by keeping in contact and maintaining close relationships with your customer database, current and new, is always an important online marketing essential. The strength of social media as a significant networking strategy for business relations has gained increasing importance in the last two years.
Alongside email marketing, sending a regular Newsletter to your opt-in subscribers reminds them of your existence – first in line when needed – and can be used to inform them first of latest offers, special prices and other exclusives.
Nevertheless, you can undermine your brand identity if recipients form an impression that much of the information from your company is either repeated, not interesting or directly relevant. In other words, they may feel that you do not understand why you are sending them a newsletter in the first place!
If you don’t know why you’re sending it, your subscribers won’t see any reason to read it and gleefully hit ‘delete’. Another one off the list!
You need to be clear about what you are aiming to achieve from sending a company newsletter. Are you simply just saying ‘hi’ to your customers, announcing a special offer promotion, brand building by reminder with general sales generation or trying to stimulate feedback?
Newsletters can really come into their own when circulated to current and potential customers in your own town, local region, or part of the country, i.e. Cheshire and the North West.
You should know your target audience and understand what they will want to read about. Remember – what you have to say about your company needs to be valuable in particular to them and what they want to hear, not just what you want to say!
Try sending two versions of your company newsletter, one to customers, the other to subscribers and prospective clients. Each can be personalised with different articles and advice according to known different interests and requirements.
Adhere to your objective and tailor content appropriately with blogs, company reports, customer case studies, expert advice, events and industry news.
Remember to check spelling and grammar and ensure all links are working. Every image should click through and possess an alt tag – and always include the ‘Unsubscribe’ function.
Finally, after much double checking, send at the known optimum times – and resend if not opened, which can be automatically scheduled on the first mailout. Check with your website design and marketing agency regarding latest email tracking software!