By Sarah Santacroce at Simplicity
If you are a small business owner who has an e-mail list and sends out newsletters, tap yourself on the back. You are doing one thing right already ! Despite all the Social Media hype, E-Mail Marketing is still a very important marketing channel. There are a few mistakes that I see regularly in newsletters though, so I thought I’d write them down:
Lack of regularity – Small businesses sometimes think that they can just send out a newsletter once every six months and expect a good “opening rate” (number of people who actually open the e-mail). Sorry to disillusion you, but if I signed up to receive your newsletter 6 months ago and never hear from you again until half a year later, I probably won’t remember who you are and just delete your e-mail. So, continuity is key to build that trust with your readers. I would say one newsletter per month is the bare minimum.
Too much info – This is kind of related to point one. The same people who send out their news only once every 6 months expect me to read their 3 page long e-mail. Most likely they will loose me after the 2nd paragraph. So not a good technique either. I recently announced to my subscribers that I will increase the frequency of my news exactly for that reason. I have too much content, articles and tips to share with them and each newsletter gets too long ! Keep it short and to the point.
Not the right content – If someone trusts you with their e-mail and accepts to get news from you, don’t just send them your promotions, your special offers, your courses etc. People signed up because they were hoping to get some value from you, so that’s what your newsletters should be about: tips, tricks, tools you use, books you read, articles that inspired you, videos that you liked etc. etc. Of course it’s ok to slip in your own promotions every now and then, but that should not be the main content.
Not personal enough – Another thing that I tell small business owners is to try to personalize their news. Alright, people know that the newsletter went out to a big list, but they still appreciate if they feel that there is a person behind it who actually wrote this, who they can connect to. I think the biggest success of a newsletter is when people reply to it and share something with you. For example in my last edition I wrote: “I’m sitting on the plane to Copenhagen while writing this” and one of my subscribers wrote me back “No way, I’m in Sweden too this week”. That was cool !
Not adding any links back to their website – One of the objectives – besides creating trust – is to drive traffic back to your website. This will only happen if you add hyperlinks. The best way is to add a short summary of your latest blog post and then a “Read more” button that leads the reader to the full version of your post on your site. Don’t add too many links either, otherwise it will be counter-effective and the reader will not click anywhere.
Image courtesy of Svilen Milev, www.efffective.com.
Author's Bio
Sarah Santacroce is a certified social media, internet marketing, and virtual event specialist. She enjoys every aspect of small business marketing. It is her mission to help other small businesses and solopreneurs increase their visibility and use social media tools as part of their marketing strategy.
Sarah draws on 12 years of experience in Business Administration, in fields ranging from Employee Training to Public Relations at big and small companies. She became interested in Online Marketing and Social Media to promote her own business and after lots of research and numerous classes and webinars she is now offering that knowledge to other small- to mid-sized businesses who struggle to find their place on the web.
This article is the second in a series of regular contributions that Sarah will be making to her guest blog on knowitall.ch. You can see more articles from Sarah on her own website at: www.simplicityadmins.ch
To sign up to receive Sarah's newsletter, just fill in your details below:
