As a way to keep connected or as an opportunity to create new connections, one of the best communication tools you can use is an email newsletter. It provides opportunities to:
- Let people know about new products, services, books, websites, etc.
- Say where you or your company will be participating in events, booksignings or conferences
- Give your readers tips based on your field of expertise
- Promote special items such as clearance sales, special offers or discount coupons
- Tell your customers/fan base about your company through photos or interest stories
- Make sure that people know how to contact you
- Provide links back to your website to drive traffic to your site
- Gives you material to draw from for new posts on social media (Facebook, LinkedIn, etc.)
- Lets you build credibility through highlighting expertise
- Builds a sense of community
Once you have established your newsletter, you should create an archive space on your website to post back copies. These newsletters help provide searchable content for search engines and can help boost your rankings for relevant keywords by providing articles of interest.
If these benefits aren’t enough for you, then the extra bonus is that composing and planning for the newsletter is a great way to help you focus on your key business purposes by clarifying your goals and prioritizing your public information.
To publish your newsletter, you should use a service such as iContact, Constant Contact or Vertical Response (there are quite a few other email services that would work well for you). Using one of these services will allow you to use their newsletter templates to easily construct attractive documents. More importantly, they can help identify elements of your newsletter than might get tagged as spam by the recipient’s email provider.
Speaking of which, using a service can also prevent your personal email address from getting blacklisted by email providers as a spam source. This alone is well-worth the small monthly charge you pay for an email service.
One of the trickiest parts of putting together an eNewsletter is putting together your distribution list. Although most services require that your recipients must have “opted in” to receive your mailing, your existing customer base and email list will typically be an acceptable starting point. Especially if you have already been emailing these customers for regular business contacts or to let them know about things you are doing. It is not acceptable to use purchased lists on most email services unless the email users have specifically opted in to receive emails from you. Uploading your list to a service is usually pretty straightforward. From your starting point, you should use every opportunity possible to gain new email addresses through your regular contacts, making sure to ask them if they would like to be on your eNewsletter distribution list.
As you are constructing your newsletter, don’t forget to add links to your social media. This is a great way to add to your friends and build your social network.
Although it takes some planning time, writing time and organizational effort, the results will definitely be worthwhile.
What are you waiting for? Start writing!