When people choose a brand, a large part of the decision is based on which brand they’ve seen most recently, and which brand they’ve seen most often. A regular email newsletter helps ensure that companies achieve both of these and keep in touch when customers are not ready to buy.

Newsletters are also a great way to demonstrate your expertise, get more use out of your content, get permission from your customers to continue to communicate with them, and to control your communication with the market directly, potentially saving on the need to go through a third party publication at all.

There a few important things to get right to make the most of them:

 

  1. Don’t send an attached PDF, they take too long to lay out nicely and you have no way of tracking who is looking at what.
  2. Host the content on your site, on individual pages for each article, and include links in your email to each article.
  3. Keep the actual email simple and brief, a heading, opening line and a picture for each story is enough, and you can have anywhere from 1-5 stories per newsletter.
  4. Make sure the content is actually useful to your customers and not just a sales pitch. See this post on best practice for content creation.
  5. Only send the newsletter to customers who have actually requested it – the list growth might be slower, but the level of engagement will be higher.
  6. Give all customers the option to sign-up at every convenient opportunity.
  7. Ensure there is a sign-up page link that is easy to find on your website.
  8. Keep to a regular schedule and do some research to optimise the sending day and time to get the most opens.
  9. Make sure you can track opens and clicks, research your data and make improvements accordingly.
  10. Be aware of spam laws, in your own country and any other countries you are emailing to.

 

What are some other great newsletter tips?