So Why Isn’t Your Business Taking Advantage?
Who wants to start an email newsletter when you have so many other marketing strategies in play. Consider all the efforts you put in to promote your business. Depending on your company’s size, resources and growth strategy, you may be doing:
- Print advertising
- Online marketing
- Blogging
- Social media campaigns
- Webinars or speaking engagements
- Networking
- Sponsorships
- Sales promotions
- Giveaways
No matter which of the above activities you’re doing, you must be tracking responses and weighing your return on investment. As any business person will tell you: “Why continue to do something that isn’t working for you?” Tracking where your business comes from is as important as promoting your business.
If you’re satisfied with these undertakings, you may believe you have no reason to start an email newsletter. Everything else is working, and you’re growing. Starting a newsletter takes work, coordination and above all, content. Where will you find the time?
But You Can’t Afford Not to Start an Email Newsletter
Getting a newsletter off the ground isn’t as difficult as you think. And the rewards can be phenomenal. To persuade you to start an email newsletter, here are the best five reasons to get on it today:
- You collect a list of email addresses. To start an email newsletter, you need email addresses. To get email addresses, you have to entice people to sign up and voluntarily give you their email addresses. Giving away a free webinar, ebook or company swag may be enough. Many companies just ask for an email at the checkout or as part of the client contract.
After a brief email address-collecting campaign, you’ll have enough of an audience to start sending out your email newsletter. And that list of email addresses has suddenly become a company asset. It’s a list of current and potential customers! It’s a gold mine if you use it properly. Collecting those email addresses is valuable enough for any business to want to start an email newsletter.
- You put your company branding in front of your audience every month. Most email newsletters go out monthly. That means every month — 12 times a year — you get to put your message in front of a growing number of customers and potential clients. You get to share news, offer tips and maybe promote special discounts. And it goes out electronically to as many people as you can get to give you their email addresses. There is no upper limit.
What your email newsletter contains should be worth reading, of course. You want your audience to look forward to your newsletter and to open it when it arrives in their inboxes. Otherwise, it doesn’t work. But think of it: your brand in front of a willing audience every month. That kind of face time via any other media — television, radio, print, social media or online ads — would be prohibitively expensive.
- You gain access to detailed reports at a click of a mouse button. All email newsletter delivery services — and there are many — offer analytics. For each newsletter you send, you’re able to find out how many were delivered, how many were opened, how many recipients clicked through from a link in the newsletter to your website. Some services break down the numbers by location, gender and age. Sometimes, you can get even more granular data.
Think of how valuable that information is to your business. Companies large and small often spend enormous amounts of time and money to find out who’s buying from them and what they want from your business. When you start an email newsletter, that information is readily available. Soon after you send your first newsletter, you can start collecting and analyzing that data.
- You can reuse the content from your newsletter. Remember that one of the objections to starting an email newsletter was finding the time it takes to develop the content for it. And it’s an expense, whether you do it in-house or hire a firm like Ray Access to write it for you. But this is content that gets delivered through email. It’s not posted online, so Google won’t penalize you for duplicate content. That means you can reuse that content in other ways.
Pull out the discount promotion from your newsletter and use it in a print ad. Grab a couple of pull-quotes and add them to your home page. Reprint a newsletter article as a blog post on your website. (You also can use your unique blog posts as fodder for the newsletter if they’re well written and pertinent.) The money you spent developing that content isn’t wasted; it’s a bonanza! You can never have too much good content about your industry, your business, your products or your services.
- You may want to run advertisements for your partners in your newsletter. After you start your email newsletter, you have to let it grow before considering this last tip. But once your newsletter has a big enough recipient list and you know your audience is opening it — you know the numbers and can back them up with reports — you can sell ads in your newsletter. You have to carefully curate those ads so you know they’ll be useful to your audience, but you may reach a point that your email newsletter is paying for itself … or even making your business a little money.
When you’ve started a successful email newsletter, you have a way of reaching out into your target market, an audience that’s already interested in your business. You can continue to provide value-added content to keep them hooked, but you can add ads, slowly at first, small enough to not get in the way, to gradually capitalize on that market. If the ads are in line with your values and are for businesses that complement yours, you can build on your success.
Start an Email Newsletter Today!
So, what are you waiting for? You now have enough ammunition to persuade your boss or your lender that you should start an email newsletter. You now know the value a newsletter can bring. A successful email newsletter creates many advantages and two distinctly new assets that add value to your business:
- The newsletter itself
- The list of email addresses
That’s just the bare minimum of benefits your newsletter can deliver. By slowly building up your newsletter, you broaden your company’s reach while satisfying your customers’ desires for inside information, special deals and useful tips. It’s time for your business to start an email newsletter. Here’s what you need to know. Make it even easier, and let Ray Access develop, write and distribute it for you. Contact us for an estimate!
Ray Access is a content marketing firm that delivers targeted words to empower your business. Contact us about your specific project to receive a quote or discuss your needs. We write website copy, blog posts, e-newsletters and more. Everything we do is thoroughly researched, professionally edited and guaranteed original.
