Why You Need A Newsletter
A newsletter is a great way to share information with your subscribers regularly. Not only does it help to keep them up-to-date on what’s happening with your business, but it also allows you to build a relationship with them. To get subscribers to subscribe to your newsletter, you’ll need to offer them something of value.
This could be anything from exclusive discounts to helpful tips and behind-the-scenes content. Once you have an enticing offer, you can promote your newsletter through social media, your website, or offline methods such as flyers or business cards.
With a little effort, you can quickly build a loyal subscriber base for your newsletter, and thats exactly what we will discuss in this blog. So buckle up, get your coffee ready, and explore the top reasons you need an email newsletter!
Here are just a few of the many reasons why you should publish an email newsletter;
1. Keeps Your Customers Informed
One of the primary purposes of an email newsletter is to keep your customers informed about your product or service. So whether you offer a new product or service, have news about your company, or want to keep your customers updated on what’s going on, an email newsletter is a perfect way to do it.
2. Newsletters Help You Stay Top-of-Mind
With so many businesses competing for attention online, staying top-of-mind with your target audience can be challenging. However, if you consistently publish a quality email newsletter, you will always have a way to stay in front of your customers and keep your business on their minds.
3. Provides an Engaging Way to Promote Your Business
Email newsletters provide an engaging way to promote your business. Unlike other marketing channels, such as social media or paid advertising, email newsletters allow you to directly reach your target audience with a personal message. This can help you build a stronger relationship with your subscribers and promote your business more effectively.
4. Cost-Effective
Email newsletters are one of the most cost-effective marketing channels available. Not only are they less expensive to produce than other marketing materials, but they also have a much higher return on investment. In fact, for every $1 spent on email marketing, the average return is $44.25!
Keep your audience in the loop!
You may think you don’t need a newsletter because you have a blog. But if you want to succeed with your article marketing campaigns, you need both! A blog is a great way to keep people updated on what’s happening with your business, but it shouldn’t be the only method you use to communicate with potential and current customers.
Email newsletters offer you a chance to:
- Share information that doesn’t fit well on a blog post, such as shorter articles, stories, or guides.
- Include coupon codes, special offers, and other promotional items that would interest your subscribers.
- Provide personal updates about your business, such as sharing staff pictures or events. You can take a more personal approach to communicate with a newsletter than with a blog. You can also include items that interest your subscribers but wouldn’t work well as blog posts, such as shorter articles, stories, or guides.
However, the real question remains: How can we build an Email newsletter that stands out and gets read?
If you want to build an email newsletter that gets read, you need to focus on two things:
- The content of your newsletter.
- The design of your newsletter.
Let’s start with the content. The most important thing to remember is that your subscribers are busy people who get a lot of emails. They don’t have time to read a novel, so keep your newsletter short and to the point.
Few things to remember when writing content For your newsletter:
- Valuable – Your customers should see it as a resource, not a waste of time.
- Consistent– You should publish it at least monthly, if not more often.
- Focused – It should target your ideal audience and have one primary goal.
- Short – People are busy, and no one wants to read a novel.
Here are a few tips to ensure your audience reads and engages with your newsletter;
1- Start with a great headline
The headline is essential to your email because it lets people open it. If your headline isn’t interesting, no one will read the rest of your newsletter.
Here are some tips for creating great headlines:
- Make it specific: A general headline like “Our latest news” won’t grab attention like one particular headline like “New product launch: The world’s most comfortable shoes.”
- Make it benefit-oriented: A headline like “How to improve your website’s conversion rate” tells the reader what they will get from reading the newsletter.
- Make it enjoyable: A headline like “5 interesting facts about dogs” is more likely to be clicked than a headline like “5 facts about dogs.”
- Make it urgent: A headline like “Last chance to get 50% off your purchase” creates a sense of urgency that will make people want to read the newsletter immediately.
2- Include a great offer
Your newsletter should always include a great offer, such as a coupon code, discount, or free shipping. People are more likely to read and act on a newsletter if there’s an incentive to do so.
Make sure your offer is:
Relevant to your products or services: Your offer should be related to the products or services you sell. If you sell shoes, for example, your offer could be for free shipping on all shoe orders.
Easy to understand and redeem: Your offer should be straightforward and easy to understand. It should also be easily redeemable, with a precise expiration date and other necessary details.
Attractive to your target audience: Your offer should be something your target audience would be interested in. For example, if you sell products for mothers, your offer could be for a free baby carrier with purchase.
3- Write great content
Your newsletter content should be interesting, well-written, and relevant to your target audience. It should also be shorter than your blog posts, as people are likelier to skim a newsletter than read it in-depth.
Here are some tips for writing excellent newsletter content:
Include a mix of content types: A newsletter with only text can be tedious. Mix things up by including images, videos, infographics, and other types of content.
Include a call-to-action: Every piece of content in your newsletter should have a call-to-action, such as “Click here to learn more” or “Buy now.”
4. Design a beautiful layout
Your newsletter layout should be visually appealing and easy to read. People should be able to scan it and understand what it’s about.
Here are some tips for designing an excellent newsletter layout:
Use a clear hierarchy: Use headings, subheadings, and bullet points to break up your content and make it easy to scan.
Use color wisely: Too much color can be overwhelming, so use it sparingly. Instead, please stick to one or two colors, and use them to highlight important information.
Use a simple layout: A complex layout with too many elements can be overwhelming. Instead, stick to a simple design with a clear hierarchy of information.
Use images sparingly: Too many pictures can make your newsletter look like an ad. Use images sparingly, and ensure they add to the content, not distract.
Use white space: White space makes your newsletter easier to read and more visually appealing.
Formatting and delivering your email newsletter;
Successful newsletters can take a variety of formats. An excellent general form to use for a newsletter is:
- Title and issue/volume number
- General greeting and welcome to new subscribers
- Table of contents (“In This Issue”)
- Personal message or editorial from you, the newsletter publisher
- Feature article
- Special offers section
- Links to other articles and resources
- Conclusion and what’s coming in the next issue
- Invitation and permission to forward the newsletter to friends
- Unsubscribe instructions
Note: All permission-based list emails, including newsletters, must include instructions on unsubscribing. Otherwise, it is considered spam.
There are many ways to put a newsletter together physically. For example, you can type the text in a word processing program and copy and paste your newsletter into emails. You should also post back issues of your newsletter on your website and invite visitors to view them—which will encourage subscription requests.
If you type your newsletter manually and plan to deliver the issues via email, you should know that different email platforms use different default view settings. Have you ever received an email that appears choppy, with uneven line lengths, dangling words, and carat (>) symbols everywhere? This is a result of varying email defaults.
To avoid having your newsletter digitally massacred, you have to keep your lines of text at even lengths that fall slightly below the maximum number of character spaces per line most email programs allow.
Generally, line defaults are 70 to 75 characters. To keep your newsletter correctly formatted, use a fixed-width 10-point font such as Courier New (Arial and Times New Roman are variable-width fonts and will result in uneven lines) and insert a hard return following every 60 to 65 characters.
The frequency of your newsletter will likely depend on how much material is available on your subject and how often you anticipate being able to generate fresh content. Most newsletters are published weekly or bi-weekly, and some run monthly or quarterly.
A word of caution here: never plan to publish a newsletter more frequently than you can realistically handle.
You generally have two choices for your newsletter’s delivery method. You can either send the entire newsletter directly in the body of an email or email a link to a private page on your website. If possible, it is best to send the entire newsletter, as more people will likely read it. However, if you have a particularly long or complex newsletter, you can email an abridged version with newsletter highlights and a link to the complete publication.
Getting newsletter subscribers;
The most obvious—and surprisingly overlooked—method for gaining newsletter subscribers is to place a subscription box on the front page of your website. Be sure to indicate that signing up for your newsletter is free and that the email addresses you collect will be used only to deliver your newsletter.
You should also create a “landing page” dedicated to your newsletter, with a subscription box, an extended description of what the newsletter is all about, a list of subscriber benefits, and links to your sample issue and archives. Treat your landing page as a separate website: submit the URL to search engines, and include a link to it in the resource box of selected articles.
Since your landing page is not an article, you can treat it as an advertisement. But, of course, Internet users expect to be “sold” when visiting a newsletter page, so feel free to tout the benefits of signing up for your newsletter here.
Successful landing pages create a sense of urgency and convey that non-subscribers miss out on great deals and information. Include opportunities to subscribe on this page several times—and don’t forget your disclaimer. There must be a way to unsubscribe visibly posted on your landing page and a statement that collected email addresses will not be sold, shared, or exchanged with third parties.
In addition to traditional website promotion, two methods of spreading the word about your publication are exclusively available to newsletters and ezines: announcement lists and newsletter directories.
Announcement lists are subscription-based emails sent to subscribers interested in newsletters and ezines. You must first subscribe to the publication to appear on an announcement list. Setting up a separate email account with a free web provider and subscribing to announcement lists using that address is good. Once you’re subscribed, you can submit a request for a one-time listing that will be included in the next issue of the announcement list’s mailing.
Newsletter directories are permanent web catalogs that list available e-publications, usually grouped into categories. When you submit a listing for inclusion in a newsletter directory, you will often be assigned a user name and password so you can make changes to your listing in the future. Again, it is advisable to use a separate email account to sign up with newsletter directories (it can be the same as the one you use for the announcement lists).
Before you begin submitting to announcement lists and newsletter directories, you should have the following information prepared:
- Your newsletter title
- Your website URL
- Your landing page URL
- Subscription instructions (autoresponder email address or URL containing your subscription box)
- A brief, two- to three-sentence description of your newsletter
- A longer, two- to three-paragraph report (not call lists and directories will require this information)
- A list of targeted keywords and phrases for your newsletter
- Unsubscribe instructions
You’ll find an extensive section of links to announcement lists and newsletter directories in the Resources section of this book.
Getting Your Articles in Circulation
Reprinting your articles in other newsletters that pertain to your topic is another excellent facet of article marketing. Many newsletter publishers will find your articles when you list them in article directories (an issue discussed further in this chapter). However, it would help if you also got the ball rolling by contacting newsletter publishers and offering your articles for reprint.
Finding a match
The first step in this process is locating newsletters related to your business. Newsletter directories are a great place to start. Since directories are usually arranged by category, you’ll find a slew of related newsletters with just a few clicks.
You can also use search engines to find relevant publications. Run a search for “newsletter” + “topic” or “ezine” + “topic,” and you will likely generate thousands of results. Not all newsletters are listed in directories, and you may find some gems using this method.
Another way to find targeted newsletters is to ask other people. For example, if you have business contacts in your field, email them requesting recommendations for sound, industry-related newsletters. If you have a blog, put out a request to your readers. Most people love to share information and opinions.
Once you have a list of newsletters you’d like to target, you should subscribe to each one of them—using the alternate address you’ve set up for your newsletter submissions. You may want to keep contacting the publishers until you’ve subscribed for a few subjects. This way, you can honestly tell them you enjoy their newsletter after familiarizing yourself with the formats and the type of information they offer.
The next step is composing an email introducing you as a newsletter subscriber. Try to mention something specific to the newsletter that you enjoy. Then, let the publisher know that you have several articles that may interest subscribers and ask whether they would like to reprint one in a future issue. It’s a good idea to offer a choice of several articles.
When you contact newsletter publishers, you should never send a single email to several addresses at once. No one enjoys receiving emails addressed to dozens of different people—and even if you use your email blind-copy feature, you won’t be able to personalize a mass mailing. Also, unsolicited emails sent to multiple addresses tend to get lodged in spam filters, never to be read.
Remember that Internet marketing is based on trust and developed relationships. Sending blatant bulk emails is a fast way to break trust.
Article Directories
Article directories are vast repositories of free information. These sites allow busy webmasters to grab free content for their websites and newsletters. The catch is that they must include a resource block listing the article author’s bio and website links to post permission-free.
It’s good to give things away.
Why should you give your articles away for free? You’ve put work hours into them or paid for the rights with your hard-earned cash. Shouldn’t you make some money from your work or investment?
You will earn money—just not directly. Instead, when you allow other people to reprint your articles (including your resource box), you’ll have inbound links to your website spread across the Internet. This will boost your search engine rank and bring more traffic to your website.
The articles themselves will help you convert more visitors to sales. By establishing yourself as an expert through your informative (and accessible!) articles, you will earn that all-important trust Internet businesses need to flourish. The exposure you will gain by giving your articles away will more than justify the effort and the investment you put into them.
Articles submitted to article directories should be high-quality, extremely informative material. This requirement is simple: you’re competing with hundreds or thousands of articles on similar topics. The higher the article quality and the more information it contains, the more likely other webmasters and newsletter publishers will be to choose your articles over the competition.
A directory of article directories
Following are some of the many article directories you can submit your articles to for reprinting and distribution:
Ezine Articles – www.ezinearticles.com
Marketing Seek – www.marketing-seek.com
Idea Marketers – www.ideamarketers.com
Article City – www.articlecity.com
Article Central – www.articlecentral.com
Article Dashboard – http://articledashboard.com
Note: Article directory sites often require specific formatting when submitting articles for inclusion. Be sure to visit each site’s submission guidelines and follow the formatting instructions, or your articles will not be listed.
