With social media and SEO dominating the small business marketing landscape for the last few years, many firms have taken their eyes off one of the most cost-effective and highest returning customer channels available to them – email newsletters.
Email may not be as trendy as modern tools such as Facebook, Twitter, but it’s still a quiet communications powerhouse that the vast majority of both business and personal users rely on to carry out 90% of their day-to-day online tasks.
Regardless of what business you’re in, if you haven’t yet taken the time setting up a newsletter, you could be leaving easy money on the table. Let’s break down the top five reasons why your business needs a newsletter.
- You’re Meeting Your Customers Where They Are
Your company website is hopefully busy doing its job in attracting new business and getting the word out about your products and services. Let’s face it though, people are only going to go out of their way to visit your site so often every week.
On the other hand, people are faithfully checking their email accounts multiple times per day, every day. Anything that opens the door to that environment is potentially incredibly useful. It gives you a means of reaching out directly to your audience, rather than waiting for them to come to you.
- Newsletter Setup Has Never Been Easier
Older readers may remember a time when the idea of setting up a company newsletter would have involved potentially enormous amounts of pain involving email servers, whitelists, and endless formatting and delivery problems. Happily those days are gone.
Modern third-party services such as MailChimp mean that you can be up and running with a stylish, modern newsletter in minutes, and take advantage of advanced tools to manage your list for a tiny outlay per month.
- You’re Creating An Ongoing Relationship With Customers
A well-run newsletter transforms your initial encounter with a customer or client from a one-time event into a potentially long-term relationship. By consistently providing readers with value over time, you’re creating ongoing goodwill and interest – and effectively winning permission to pitch at a time of your choosing.
- You’re Creating A Tangible Marketing Asset
Over time, your newsletter will become a tangible asset in its own right. As your numbers grow, you’ll start to see reliable patterns in terms of open rates, actions taken, and the amount of revenue that each newsletter shot and subscriber are worth on average.
These are real numbers that combine to form a powerful business asset you can cultivate over time – one that’s under your control rather than subject to the whims of Google.
- You’re Driving Sales
Research from companies such as Experian suggests that every $1 spent on email marketing and newsletters can reap rewards of up to $45 on average. Think about that for a moment – if you knew you could spend $1 to make $45, would you do it? Of course you would.
A well-constructed newsletter campaign gives you a reliable lever you can pull to pitch special offers, sales, and available products and services to bring in more to your bottom line. Devote some dedicated resources to growing and managing your newsletter list over time, and you’ll soon find yourself sitting on a powerful sales engine that will be the envy of your competitors.
Newsletters might not always seem an obvious fit for every firm, but it’s a rare business that wouldn’t benefit from having a well-maintained set of prospects or existing customers who they have explicit permission to contact at will. If you haven’t already, make this the year you start finally taking advantage of this killer marketing channel!
