Newsletters have evolved to be more than just a tool of continuous engagement, remembrance, and recall. Just having a ‘Subscribe’ link on your homepage is not going to cut it. For a well-established brand, having a steady influx of communication is a welcome thing for the customers. But that is not always true in case of small and medium-sized businesses.
Why Are Newsletters Important for SMEs?
Newsletters for SMEs are a tool for building new customer relations and nurturing the existing ones, which is why just piling on blogs and your internal updates will only turn your newsletter into a one-sided monologue for your customers.
“You have to be careful, as a brand, that you don’t cross the borders and boundaries of spamming,” said Molly McKinley, the executive vice president of marketing for Relola and the host of a panel on email newsletters at Inman Connect New York. “Headlines matter, your subject line matters, content is important. Think about prioritizing content based on action and what’s most valuable to you.
“Think about why you’re sending this email before you hit the send button, and make sure when you’re editing that everything sort of looks and feels aligned with the reason you are sending it,” she added. “And if not, if you’re in doubt, then scrap it.”
Tread carefully while you strategize for your newsletter
Newsletters are sent out regularly to fuel remembrance, recall and to keep your customers updated about anything new that is happening at your end. After a while it gets monotonous and customers tend to ignore and eventually unsubscribe.
Did you ever wonder why that happens?
To understand how should SMEs tackle this scenario in the marketing and communication matrix of an organization, I caught up with Sam Mallikarjunan, Executive Strategist at HubSpot, PDP Instructor at Harvard University.
“The big mistake in that scenario is thinking that email is a channel to talk about you. The art/science is figuring out how to send the right message to the right person at the right time. Just keeping people updated is boring and rarely relevant, so it’s not going to win the battle for inbox attention. Communications should be triggered off behaviors or agreements for what adds value to the customer or prospect and contain content relevant to them and their individual challenges and position in the buying cycle.”
Plan well and get those Opens and CTRs hiking up
Whether you send your newsletter fortnightly or weekly or monthly, whatever information you pack into your newsletter, should be knowledgeable and of an incremental value to your customers. Get specific. Tell your potential subscribers exactly what will be in the newsletter as well as how often they should expect to hear from you.
Add a catchy subject line. Because hey! Face value matters a lot when you are trying to pry your customer’s attention through a sea of emailers that flood into her inbox EVERY SINGLE DAY! Next, plan your content well, complement it with a beautiful design and complete it with a nice call to action, and voila!
Here are a couple of examples of some popular brand newsletters that have high conversion rates every single time!
charity:water – Making transactional emails informative, charity:water gives a deep dive information about how and where your donation moves, upfront! They are not known for their zero-budget organic marketing for nothing!
eMarketer: Although popular as a place for some really interesting listicles, eMarketer’s newsletters really catch your eye! And the reason is their quirky subject lines!
Do try out our suggestions with Juvlon’s Email and SMS Marketing Solutions and let us know how they turned out for you. We would love to hear your experience!