Among the various avenues you can explore for marketing/promotion of your business, one that is significantly underrated and under-utilized by most businesses is Newsletter Promotion. When we invest in marketing funnels via different channels to multiply growth, they are most often cost consuming, await high level approvals and have low ROI.
The biggest advantages of a Newsletter promotion are:
– You get to target a large audience
– Does not involve high costs
– Takes less time, resources than most other
promotional campaigns
– Room for creativity galore
Creativity in this vertical can be totally out-of-the-box, crazy and often succeed in ticking the emotional side of consumers. It needs a certain bit of expertise in the process, but you can get there with time. For beginners, most are not sure how to carry out the Newsletter campaign effectively.
A Newsletter allows you to share some of your most popular service offerings and best selling deals to a specific target audience. And more often than not, you are targeting qualified leads. So this can work to your advantage if you can make this informative, catchy and interesting. While at the same time, there are some important considerations.
So what are the aspects to consider? For a start, review the following.
- How to trap your lead? Think about ways that work in your domain, could be promotional offers, codes, free trainings, downloads, whatever!
- Smashing squeeze page
- Link it back to your landing page that elaborates your promotional offer in detail.
- Encourage Sign up activity on all your high volume pages
- Establish secure sign ups, address privacy concerns
- Allow social media sign ups (less hassle and form fill ups)
- Allow one-click options to email and print the newsletter for easy sharing and engagement.
- Incentivize sign ups – offer free goodies, downloads, access to your Blog, a glimpse of your highest selling product etc.
- Don’t fool your audience into believing you are offering anything for free (unless you are).
- Conditional offers must be made explicit enough to prevent them to believe otherwise.
If you are thinking “how can I make a smashing squeeze page”, here are some factors to consider. Include testimonials, jaw dropping numbers, highest selling points, and combine them all to form a catchy theme that goes well with your industry. Here again, take risks if you dare. Most of your competitors will be conventional and have a similar approach. Why don’t you go out there and surprise them all? Just be strikingly different and thrill your audience. If nothing, it will catch their attention!
Include Sign up button in your Newsletter and add a link it to the landing page – handy if the newsletter is shared or circulated, you may have added sign ups. Other to-add points are ‘Refer a friend’ and social share buttons.
Set expectations about the outcome of the signup. This is critical as misleading newsletter could get you a lot of negative criticism. Also, it works in your favor – the more informed decision they make, the higher chances of them responding and contributing to the community. You don’t want a surge in sign-ups only to lose them all just as quickly. You can optimize the newsletter by adding other opt-in check boxes to your parallel campaigns, forms and business news feed.
The other thing you could do to make it a success is to be active and respond with enthusiasm to other campaigns from your vertical. By being an active participant on similar such communities you stand higher chances of being responded to from your community members and spread the word among your co-members.
There are perhaps tons of other ways to go about creating an effective and successful Email/ Newsletter campaign. Be creative, look around, research and just do it. You will out-perform the next time and the next!
