An email newsletter is not only one of the most lucrative small business models on the Internet, it’s also the easiest one to get into, due in part to the low startup costs – for less than $100, you can start a small website and an email delivery system. The fact that you can work from anywhere where there’s Internet access makes it even better. However, getting from point A to point B is not as simple as one would expect. In order to create profit from your newsletter, you have to take the following recommended steps first:
1. Get a Healthy List – whether you’re building your list through an opt-in form on your website or just buying from someone else, you have to ensure that it’s a quality list made up of contacts who are aware of what they signed up for. Don’t buy lists full of people who were tricked into signing up, or worse – lists full of abandoned email addresses.
2. Compile a list of potential partners – try to collate a list of companies or marketers who have products that may suit your targeted readership. Then you can contact them later and try to strike a deal for cross promotion or even freebies that can be used as giveaways for contests. (more…)
An email newsletter is easily one of the most powerful and cost-effective marketing tool a small business can have. An email newsletter will help small businesses drive traffic to their website, connect with customers, and build more awareness for their brand and company but unlike traditional marketing channels, you can do it without spending thousands of dollars.
However, before your business gets to enjoy those things, you first need to have an effective newsletter. For all its benefits and advantages, a low quality newsletter will be a waste of time, money, and opportunity. So in order to avoid the unenviable position of having a newsletter that nobody reads, you need to follow these 6 email newsletter best practices for small businesses:
First, Craft an Effective Subject Line
If your subject line isn’t effective, it’s pretty much the end of the line. Your email newsletter will never be read if it fails to catch the attention of the user. There is a reason why copywriters are taught how to put all of their creativity when writing headlines – because that’s the first thing that a reader will see, and it’s going to be the deciding factor on whether the article will be read or ignored. The same thing applies to email newsletters.
Now, there’s no single guideline on what kind of subject line will be effective. It will vary depending on your target demographic and your niche, but try to study it a little bit and find out the right kind of words that will get the attention of your readers. One rule of thumb is that you have to avoid being flagged as spam, so avoid subject lines containing words that are associated with spam and make sure the subject line is related to the contents. (more…)
It’s true that newsletters are very powerful channels for communication and engagement with your customers, regardless of the type of business. However, it’s also true that maintaining a regular newsletter will require at least a little bit of investment in terms of time and manpower (both of which cost money). This means that in very rare cases, maintaining a regular newsletter isn’t worth the cost if your business doesn’t really need it.
The tricky part is that if your business really needs a newsletter and you don’t have one out of a misguided attempt to save on costs, you may be losing out on a lot of benefits – the same benefits that would cost you hundreds of thousands of dollars on advertising, marketing, and selling just to replicate manually. So how do you know if your business needs a newsletter? You may want to consider the following:
1. You Need to Constantly Keep in Touch With Willing Customers.
The thing about certain types of businesses is that you need to ensure that your brand or business name is constantly put in front of your prospects, but at the same time, you need to avoid forcing it down people’s throats as that will resort in your brand gaining a negative reputation for being annoying or even spammy. With a newsletter, you can regularly remind prospects of your brand and business name, as well as the products or services you offer but without annoying them. People who are receiving your newsletters specifically signed up for it, so you’re basically able to directly advertise and market to people who have given you permission to do so. (more…)
When it comes to getting higher newsletter click throughs, the answer is a matter of common sense: just send out newsletters that people would want to open and read. Of course, the real difficulty lies in knowing just exactly what kind of newsletter people want, or what you can do to make your newsletter attractive to prospective readers.
Many novice marketers stumble when it comes to this part, because they are under the impression that there’s no way to know every single one of their thousands of subscribers, so they won’t be able to find out what which one wants and how they can write a newsletter that would appeal to everyone (or at least the majority).
This is a self-defeating way of thinking. It’s true that the sheer number of people on an average list means that the preferences and tastes you’d have to deal with are varied to the extremes. However, social psychology has already proven that there are general principles you can follow in order to give the majority what they want, giving you impressive open and clickthrough rates. Here are a few of them: (more…)
If you’ve been keeping your ears close to the ground, you are well aware that revenue is down for many ad-supported websites, mainly because rates have gone down and people just aren’t clicking as much as they used to. And since their business models depend a lot on a steady stream of traffic coming from search engines, each algorithm update shakes things up puts them at risk of losing revenue (and many already did, actually.)
But do you want to know one channel where people are still making a killing? E-Newsletters. These crafty marketers are making a ton of profit on a mode of communication that many people have already written off as outmoded, trampled upon by the rise of social media channels. The really ironic part to this is that e-newsletters are still much more profitable than social networks and even ad-supported e-commerce sites.
Best of all, once the subscription base is healthy and the business is running, they’re very rarely, if ever, affected by algorithm changes on major search engines. They don’t sit around waiting for people to arrive – they actually get the priviledge to appear on people’s inboxes. An e-newsletter is a much deeper commitment, and more conducive to purchases. (more…)
It’s common knowledge among marketers that email is still one of the most powerful channels for marketing, considering that an email newsletter can singlehandedly improve a company’s bottomline if it’s effective in getting website visitors to convert. However, email newsletters are just one step in a series. After all, even the best newsletters won’t do your business any good if you only have a handful of subscribers. If you want to increase newsletter subscription, you should try to keep the following in mind:
Make it Easy for Users to Sign Up for Your Newsletters
The thing about sign ups is that it’s the single most important step in increasing your subscribers. However, it can also be a dealbreaker. Filling out forms is not an enjoyable process, and many marketers fail to remember this very important fact, resulting in sign up forms that are so tedious that potential subscribers get turned off, or even give up halfway.
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You want to make this part as easy and fast as you can. Ask only for the necessary information. If you really need extra details, you can ask for it later in follow up e-mails. You just need them to go through with the sign up process as fast as you can.
David Ogilvy is a big name in traditional advertising. Those of you who are into direct marketing or direct response marketing might associate his name to one of the biggest advertising agency in the world.
What many don't know is that Ogilvy is the number one antagonist of a traditional advertising. In this 7-minute video, Ogilvy pours out his "secret weapon" that made him a superstar in advertising, that secret weapon is direct mail. He insists that getting the product direct to the consumer is a far more cost efficient way of marketing. He insists that "creativity" and "originality" is the most dangerous word in advertising and marketing. He insists that creativity is a nothing more than an excuse to veer away from the necessity of measuring campaigns because it is in the measuring that you can really unlock what can sell a product.
