Is it worth spending time and effort producing a newsletter for your business?
The web is awash with internet marketing advice saying that e-mail capture and a newsletter is a most effective means of communicating with customers. And some reputable newsletter producers like
Cooperpress
and
Next Draft
have created cracking businesses from their production.
Here's a comparison % of e mails getting opened in different sectors, to check how popular newsletters are for what you offer:
Above is just an excerpt, the full list is here:
smartinsights.com
Newsletters can be targeted towards a most specific customer group - so your newsletter could be aimed at your highest value or loyal and reliable customers, maybe. Your main aim needs to be to write extremely helpful content for your particular target group, and to build a relationship with them through this content.
If you're a one-person freelance writing business, then this doesn't need to be scaled to the grandiose. Once a month may suffice and you're after a small number of meaningful relationships, rather than bombarding people with newsletters and content they have no interest in. You're digging deep rather than sprawling wide...
CONTENT, CREATION AND COST
Your newsletter does not need a complex structure. You could start with your subject FAQs and concerns and create steers for these - and I'd suggest your opening is as much about your audience as you can possibly make it, only leading into what you've been up to, later in. You'll need to decide how much original content to make and the extent to which you curate other people's content.
What you're reading here currently is one structure for a newsletter: one fairly dense post, link and information-wise, followed by a few helpful links I've curated over the past month. In FYI Reach newsletters, I use a three-section structure: what's helpful how-to info, what's quirky and new, and what is locally relevant.
NEWSLETTER SOFTWARE
Your newsletter does not need to cost much to produce, apart from your valuable time and thinking of course... For the most modest update, you may want to look at
Tiny Letter
run by MailChimp, or its fuller offer
Mailchimp
, which has lots of help on its site and is free for up to 2000 subscribers. I know writers who are loyal to
Madmimi
and for cost effectiveness on a large scale
Your Mailing List Provider
has fans.
If you use software like MailChimp, it gives you terrific insights into what your clients are interested in, like this:
So you know what content your readers want more of.
Alan Simpson
is a Udemy instructor, writer and web authority who curates helpful collections of links and this is his one on
e mail marketing for free.
And if you celebrate it, Easter is coming soon, the time of new beginnings... so it's a perfect chance to get cracking.
This is
FYI's newsletter archive
and here are three newsletters we find especially helpful, the first of which is made in Wales.
The Do Lectures Newsletter
The Weekend Digest
Community.is
Happy reading and creating!
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