As you may know one of my all time favorite marketing tools is the newsletter. I've loved newsletters since I was a kid, getting them in the mail from missionaries and places we visited as a family was something I always looked forward to, and when email came around it became that much more inexpensive for businesses and organizations to send them out and keep many more people up to date at a fraction of the cost.
Before we get into the actual topic of today's post, I did want to throw out there that some people use a blog as a much less formal "newsletter," and if that's how you're more comfortable and if you're actually willing and able to keep up with the consistency, that's OK, and I would prefer you did that than pretended you were willing and able to keep up a newsletter and don't actually do it. How you keep people updated about what's going on, whether it's the informal blog posts or the very formal news releases, is less important than the fact that you consistently do so. But today I thought we'd talk about the biggest challenge most people and organizations have about doing newsletters and that's the content. What do we share anyway? For the next two weeks we're going to dive into a bunch of different industries and ideas and why they work.
Highlight products: I got a newsletter the other day from a company that sells lots of health products and in this newsletter they highlighted a specific product I didn't know they sold but had been thinking about buying recently. Of course I clicked the link to see more about those products, and while I didn't make a purchase that day I now have in the back of my mind that they do sell them and when I'm ready to make that purchase I know I can go to them for that product. So what is product highlighting? It's exactly what it sounds like: letting people know exactly what you sell from newest to oldest, and from favorites to selectively purchased. If you've got a catalogue of hundreds of products in theory you could send out a newsletter every day of the year with a different product in it and you would have at least a year's worth of content to share about before you would have to repeat it. Of course you'll want to include at least a picture and brief description of the product along with the link to the product on your site (or state that it's now available in your retail store at the front display or wherever it may be). You can highlight products whether you sell books, sushi, vitamins, makeup, you offer landscaping and gardening services (and share about the plants people may want you to plant), or host health and fitness classes (and highlight the individual classes and instructors).
Highlight people: In your newsletter you can feature customers, team members, and recipients of your non-profit services. By celebrating customers you let subscribers know that you are making sales, and each customer testimony or story helps people get to know your business better. Team members are great to feature because it helps people get to know them and feel like they've got a friendly face when they come to shop and the team members can also highlight their product or service stories and experiences which helps people get to see your business from a different perspective. And of course there's nothing like knowing where donor dollars are going, and by featuring recipients, even as a check-in years down the road, you're giving people a way to see how you contribute and exactly the impact you have.
Share samples: while we haven't yet figured out how to get food, beverages, smells or sweet puppy kisses through the screens yet there are still lots of samples we can share. We can share video clips from seminars or tutoring or cooking lessons, we can share chapters from books, we can share pages from recipe books, . This is not only creating product/service awareness, it's giving people the ability to get a taste of what you're offering which makes a huge difference in convincing people that what you're offering is worth whatever you're charging for it (or at least they'll put it on their list of things to buy when it's on sale).
Do contests/giveaways for subscribers only: some people and organizations invite subscribers to join them on social media to enter the contest or giveaway, and while there is a place for sharing about what you're doing on social, if the goal is to create a newsletter worth subscribing to you should do newsletter-specific contests/giveaways. The 'how' of it is fairly simple and mostly consistent: people can be entered to win simply by opening their newsletters, you can have a simple Google form they fill out to be entered, and you can have a button they click that enters them and takes them to your website. I do recommend requiring them to do something to be entered because otherwise they may win a prize they don't want but someone else very much does.
I'd love to hear your favorite newsletter sections, and next week I'll share more newsletter content ideas.
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