Building Newsletter Audience Base
Among the biggest expenditures a company may spend on is advertising and marketing. Knowing where to invest marketing dollars is key. Few marketing avenues can deliver a significant return on investment than newsletters.
While it may be true that they cannot replace all other forms of promoting your business, newsletters are a vital component of any well-designed marketing program.
What is a Newsletter?
A newsletter is a business tool that companies use to communicate regularly with subscribers. It is used to deliver information customers want in their email boxes. Technically, we all receive newsletters daily through our emails. It is the way brands we follow get in touch with us regularly.
With newsletters, businesses, and organisations share relevant and valuable information. Information that their stable customers, their new prospects, and subscribers may find valuable to them.
Newsletters give any business direct access to their audiences’ inboxes. It allows them to share content, promote sales, and drive traffic to their website.
What is the Purpose of a Newsletter?
Newsletters are a staple of any email marketing strategy. Big and small enterprises alike can gain extremely valuable benefits from putting out monthly newsletters. But of course, to ensure maximum results, these newsletters should be tailored to reach their targeted audiences.
Newsletters are usually employed by people or businesses that operate their websites, blogs or eCommerce. They also use it to advertise their product, services, content, articles, communicate an event, or engage in retargeting or remarketing campaigns.
Newsletters have the following purpose:
- They maintain regular contact.
- It prevents your website or blog from falling into oblivion.
- They increase visitors, and/or encourage new visitors to visit your website.
- Send various content to relevant customers/followers/customers.
- Create visiting habits among your subscribers and attract traffic.
Benefits of Newsletters
With various marketing strategies that your company may have, you may be asking yourself, ‘Does my business need a newsletter?’ You might not be so sure if there is a need to invest your time and energy, especially if you already have automation, social media, SEO, email campaigns, and the like in place.
Don’t scrap newsletters just yet. It is just as important and a valuable tool for your business’s marketing campaign.
Take a look at some of its benefits:
Establish and Build Relationships
Newsletters are a good way to stay in touch with your customers or people who might be interested in your products or services. A newsletter can help customers feel taken care of and stay in the loop while bringing in new prospects.
Today’s publishing software makes it easy to produce newsletters with appealing formats and be sent instantaneously to everyone on the company’s mailing list.
Segment your Audience
According to our furry friend at MailChimp, segmented emails get 14.31% more opens than non-segmented campaigns. MailChimp also says that segmented campaigns also get an astounding 100.95% more clicks.
Building trust with your target audience is easier if your newsletter resonates and adds value to your interaction. Segmenting your list based on your demographics, behaviours habits and overall engagement is crucial. This will provide positive results in the long run.
Educate and Inform
A big benefit of newsletters is that you, as the sender, control all the content. Your newsletter can inform and educate your readers about your latest products, highlight your employees, and share announcements, and company milestones.
Newsletters can also announce upcoming events or promotions. Additionally, they can also serve as an advertising vehicle and offer coupons or specials only for those who do read the newsletter. This is a good move to track readership.
If the company received negative press or bad customer feedback, a newsletter is also an ideal vehicle to clear up misconceptions or explain the company’s viewpoint.
Reach the Target Market
Newsletters can be delivered directly to the company’s target market. These are people who have already shown interest in the company by buying your product or availing of your services. This includes people who have signed up for the company’s email list.
Knowing this audience’s preferences or interests, you can easily address topics that it knows will interest their readers. Newsletters do this in a friendly and unobtrusive way yet keep the audience updated without openly asking for a sale or contribution.
Low Cost
Newsletters are fairly inexpensive to produce compared to other advertising and marketing vehicles. The cost of paper and postage stamps is eliminated as these newsletters are sent or delivered electronically.
Additional pages in your newsletters do not require additional personnel but can be worked on or added to existing employees’ workloads. Newsletters become easier to produce over time once the format and scope have been determined and designed.
Apart from being cost-effective, newsletters are also a time-effective strategy. Selecting a few simple goals for your newsletter makes it simple to build and remain on schedule. This goes whether your newsletters are transmitted weekly, bi-weekly or monthly.
Increase Leads and Sales
Your business most likely operates its website. It is not unlikely that customers may come across it over the net organically, but you can’t expect that people always will. A newsletter aids in driving traffic to your site.
By introducing a strong call to action, you can encourage your audience not only to drive them to your site, you can engage them through your content and hopefully sway them to make a purchase.
Why Do You Need To Build An Audience Base?
Building an audience base is different from simply finding clients, and here is why it matters. It’s not that building your audience with the ultimate goal of getting customers does not work. It’s just that there are faster and less intensive ways to find customers.
Growing an audience base is probably the most important activity you have to undertake in marketing since acquiring new audiences will cost more money as you go forward. As the economy grows, more brands flood the market trying to reach the same audience, this will ultimately increase advertising costs.
It is therefore wise to build your audience base while the cost is still low. Building a base for your niche even before you have a product to sell is important. Your company can build a product overnight, but you cannot create a huge audience base or following overnight.
Growing Your Audience Base
Now that we know the benefits of developing an email newsletter, it’s time to go a step further. We must learn how to grow our subscriber or audience base to benefit our business.
Every business has a unique customer base. Seasoned businesses know that identifying and expanding their target audience is necessary to push their business to the next tier of success.
For newer businesses, though, expanding their target audience can be a difficult task at the onset. That is where a newsletter signup comes in to make things easier.
1. Newsletter Subscription
Acquiring a newsletter subscription is a move that may seem obvious but is often overlooked.
To put it simply, if an audience member wants to subscribe to your newsletter, is it easy for him or her to subscribe? It is ideal that in every post or article, there should be a form or a link that informs your customers that you have a newsletter that they can subscribe to.
An even better way to call out the Newsletter Subscription would be a Call To Action (CTA) depending on what your aim for the post is. This is important so that your CTA best fits the reader’s frame of mind after reading your post.
CTA’s might include:
- Try us (purchases/free trials).
- Read More (link to the next article or more articles).
- Contact Us.
- Subscribe!
Make sure to provide your readers with an easy way to subscribe to your newsletter, and you’ll be rewarded with a steady stream of subscribers. But what if you want more than just a stream?
2. Content Upgrade
A content upgrade is a digital download that is included or attached to a normal piece of content. To cite an example, an article that you just read might have a link for a download for a specific added article or content such as swipe files, worksheets, PDF files, checklists and more.
3. Gated Content
Done right, this can bring in tens, even hundreds of new subscribers. The idea is quite simple.
Instead of providing a “content upgrade” that is a version a resource, or an addition to an existing article, the gated content is the article. It can be an eBook, a tutorial, or any resource that you want to offer.
For your reader to get to this content, the reader has to provide their information to get through the gate. The beauty is, that gated content tends to attract highly-targeted leads.
If this gate is positioned correctly, it can potentially generate high numbers of leads, as we mentioned earlier. The caveat is, that your gated content is expected to be valuable.
Wrapping up
If you already have a robust email marketing strategy, you also need to develop a quality newsletter to keep your audience engaged. Employing creative tactics may entice potential subscribers to sign up. But, you have to engage with them with your content regularly.
Think: “What would grab their attention enough to subscribe to my newsletter?”
Accentuate Web Design and Marketing has more Digital Marketing Tips to assist you with your Digital Marketing Strategies to get more Leads and Sales Online. We’d also love to get in touch with you. Contact our team today.
