5 Ways Your Newsletter Becomes A Hugely Powerful Tool

A good way to build ‘subscribers’ or a community that sees you as the expert is the good old fashioned newsletter, but stop there! We don’t mean a newsletter disguised as a sales pitch, we mean a way to build advocacy amongst your database and also list building.

Here are five ways where newsletters become a powerful tool:

1. The content is engaging. Being interesting is the opposite of being sales lead. Customers don’t want to be sold anything. Rather they want to read something that is relevant to them and to take something away, to think and to respond. If you make the effort to contact potential customers and deliver the right message, this becomes a valuable tool.
2. Provide information. If you highlight to your audience ways they can achieve best results, this turns the whole process to educate and inform. If you are providing information of worth, this will always slaughter the competitor who just wants to sell products or services.
3. Never be pushy. To build a dialogue you need a two-way communication channel, keep focused on providing ideas, tips and be seen as a useful element of your communications mix. No pestering, no hard sell, be sincere and true to what you believe in.
4. Be human. Never wax lyrically and use the industry jargon, but be honest, provide an opinion and believe in yourself. When you believe, you find courage and passion to offer real value. When you do things the right way, people listen.
5. Make it tactile. While we all know it’s easy to set up a MailChimp template and to include an online newsletter, to get the best results a printed format, that is sent with a first class stamp, becomes a valuable tool. If you build a dialogue on a one-to-one basis and inform the reader of the content and why you’re sending to them, becomes a more personal experience. Our tip: printing 4 pages A4 becomes a bit lonesome, printing A4, 8 pages on a 170gsm, changes the whole dynamic and effectively becomes a magazine.

Work to an 80-20 rule. 80 percent of your newsletters should have information of worth and value; 20 per cent can be a subtle focus on how your business can help achieve results.

If you truly want to serve your marketplace, then become a market expert, not just a product expert. A newsletter that focuses on how you serve the industry, helps position you as more knowledgeable than your competitors.

P.S. If you want to have a look at our newsletter effort (our next issue is later this month), just click here.