How a newsletter can help your small business grow

Discover a few ways to connect with your customers and drive business growth through newsletters

Once your customers walk out the door, you may be out of sight, out of mind. Stay familiar by sliding into your customers’ inboxes from time to time with quality content.

How can you do that? *Drum roll* Newsletters!

While social media is getting a lot of attention, email marketing can pack a serious punch for your business’ marketing strategy. In fact, the return on investment for email sits at $38 for every $1 spent.

Email marketing encourages trust and ongoing relationships with your existing customers. With 99% of consumers checking their emails every day and 59% of marketing emails having an influence over purchase decisions, it’s time to include them in your marketing mix.

Boost sales

Email marketing is one of the most effective marketing channels at your fingertips. It can account for approximately 23% of sales. That means if you aren’t currently using email marketing, you could be leaving a lot of money on the table.

EDM gives you the chance to provide valuable information, boost trust, and give customers a gentle nudge in the right direction for more sales. For example, you can use newsletters to showcase seasonal campaigns, trends or sales.

Your goal with EDMs should be to keep people around.

Show off your credibility and know-how

You think you’re the best in the biz and this is your chance to show it off. If you’ve got interesting insights, reflections or information your customers would enjoy, don’t sit on them –  share them! Over time, your customers will start to think of you as a thought leader and this will help you to build brand trust and authority.

By providing an insider scoop and helping your customers to learn, your relationship shifts to one based on give and take. You provide them with information, and in turn, they’ll give you their brand loyalty.

How to nail the newsletter game

Now we’ve taken a quick look at how newsletters can help your business grow, let’s look at the steps needed to get you there.

1. Have a plan

Small business owners beware: while newsletters are a great way to bring customers to your website, boost sales and provide value, you do not want to fall into spam territory. Nobody likes to be hounded with irrelevant or annoying emails on the daily!

Think of what your clients’ needs are and what you’re trying to achieve. If in doubt, ask yourself:

• What do my clients want?
• What exactly am I trying to achieve?

How often? That depends. Your business may have plenty of valuable updates and insights to share monthly. Or, you may get away with doing it quarterly or bi-annually. Our advice is that quality is always better than quantity.

2. Look at visual aspects

Don’t neglect the visuals. Posts with images have a whopping 650 per cent higher engagement than posts with just text. If your customers open your email, only to be greeted by low-quality, messy visuals – your credibility will go out the window.

Demonstrate that you give a hoot about the fine details by ensuring you have a consistent and well-defined branding style. This could be using the right font, the right types of images and even branded email templates.

3. Include a call-to-action

OK cool. So they’ve opened your email and read the content. Now what? Remember that the purpose of your email marketing efforts are to encourage your customers to take action.

Make this easy by providing a clear next step. Whether it’s picking up the phone, making a purchase or booking, or something else, close off your message with a direction of what to do next.

When appropriate, the tiniest degree of urgency can also have big impact. Including a sense of urgency can increase conversions by 27%.

4. Keep it consistent

We’re all creatures of habit and like to know what to expect. The same goes for email marketing. Be consistent with your email marketing and newsletters, and your customers will love you for it.

Keep things on point by looking at:

• Posting frequency (i.e. how often you post)
• Content
• Visuals
• Quality

Remember that it’s not content for the sake of content. You want to make sure your visuals, content and messaging are all in line with your business’ bottom line.