Every business strives to create a strong connection with their customers, as an engaged customer base leads to higher social engagements, increased sales, and more referrals. One of the best tools businesses can use to develop this connection is a newsletter. Depending on business needs, a newsletter can be used to promote offers, educate new customers about your brand, increase conversions, and more. In this article, we’ll take a deep dive into the importance of newsletters for a business and the best practices to follow when creating and sharing them with customers.
The Need for Newsletters
Whether you’re a new or established business, a consistent increase in customers is important for growth. But in a world where customers are constantly bombarded with online advertisements from infinite brands, you need to do something different to catch their attention. Unlike generic advertisements, a newsletter can be personalized to a great extent and be used to speak to customers directly. This personal touch can prove to be the deciding factor for customers choosing your business over competitors.
Similarly, newsletters can be used in your customer retention activities as well. Post-purchase, customers can be sent a personalized catalog of products and offers to prompt them to stick with your brand rather than switch. Developing a rapport with customers will increase the likelihood of them referring friends and family, which leads to more sales and registrations with a low acquisition cost.
Tips for Writing a Good Newsletter
To ensure that you reap the intended benefits from sharing newsletters, follow these tips:
1. Understand your Audience: If you serve a niche, it’s important to learn about the best ways to communicate with your audience. For instance, if the target demographic is millennials, you can use slang and modern pop culture references to make the content relatable.
2. Create Segments: Conduct a deep dive into your customer data and create segments based on where customers are in your product cycle. Each segment should have unique messaging which prompts them to take the required action. For example, customers who have registered on the site but have not made a purchase yet should be sent newsletters focused on how your product can help with their pain points and an introductory discount prompting them to make a purchase.
 3. Keep it Short and Sweet: Customers, on average, spend just 10 seconds reading a newsletter. Hence, it’s important to avoid fluff, get to the point and make it clear to the customer what they need to do, whether it is to refer someone to get a discount, sign up for an upcoming pre-sale or redeem reward points before a specific date.
Increasing Your Newsletter Readership
Similar to ads on social media, you won’t be the only business sending newsletters to customer inboxes. Here are some useful steps to consider to ensure your emails are read rather than ignored:
1. Write Good Subject Lines: According to Finance Online, adding emojis in subject lines can help businesses achieve a 39% open rate. Additionally, personalized subject lines can increase the open rate by a further 50%. Treat the subject line as the sole deciding factor customers will use to open or ignore your emails. Hence, remember to include customer names, add emojis, and have a call to action.
 2. Include Visualizations: 10 seconds is too less to explain a chunk of content in words. But it is an ample amount of time to convey your message through visualizations such as charts, maps, and other graphics. Having good visualizations in the newsletter will motivate customers to open your emails over competitors.
 3. Promote Your Newsletter: Along with having a sign-up option on your website, encourage users to subscribe to the newsletter through social media, purchase confirmation emails, and in-app/browser notifications.
 4. Track Newsletter Performance: Analyze the performance of every batch of newsletters with a strong focus on open rates, click-through rates, and views. Naturally, certain themes, subject lines, and graphics will perform better than others. Make a note of these and try to incorporate similar messaging in future newsletters.
Best Tools for Your Newsletter Campaigns
When it comes to running a successful newsletter there are various important aspects that you’ll need to handle. The process of designing, sharing, and analyzing newsletters can be made simple by using the following tools:
1. Email Marketing Software: These can be integrated with your CRM for a seamless upload of customer segments to be used for newsletter campaigns. Additionally, this software will track the performance of each email and provide in-depth data related to important metrics which can be used to improve the content, write better subject lines and increase viewership.
 2. Video Converter: Your email marketing software will provide a bunch of customizable templates to choose from as well. But sometimes, these designs can become restrictive and may not accommodate media like video. You can overcome this drawback by converting video to GIF with an online tool. Overall, this will make your newsletter more engaging, give it a unique identity, and make it stand out from the competition.
 If your business does not have the internal bandwidth to handle these activities, consider outsourcing the project to a reputed marketing agency such as Web Stores Ltd., which can undertake all major responsibilities of designing, creating customer segments, designing newsletter campaigns, and analyzing performance data, all at an affordable rate.
When it comes to running a successful business newsletter, consistency will be key. Customer interests and demands can change over time; hence, it’s important to track campaigns and modify content depending on what works. Using tools such as a background remover will bring a great level of customizations to your designs which can be used to create personalized content and cater to customer needs.
Tina Martin stays busy as a life coach and works hard to help herself and her clients achieve a healthy work-life balance. She is also working on her first book, Ideaspired: Put Your Ideas, Your Inspiration, and Yourself First to Make Your Dreams Come True. She also started ideaspired.com as a side project to reach as many people as possible, and encourage them to put their dreams first.
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