Writing a Newsletter

A newsletter is an important tool that businesses use to build a network of customers, subscribers, or prospective customers. Relevant information can be pushed directly to the audience’s inbox. Newsletter forms an important tool for lead nurturing, engaging the customers as well generating closures. Offers/ promotions, product launches, and schemes can be shared directly with customers/ prospects to drive the audience to the website or drive sales.

Also, email campaigns can be easily measured. Various metrics can be tracked like open rate, clickthrough rate, conversion rate, Bounce Rate, List Growth Rate, Email Sharing/Forwarding Rate, Overall ROI, and Unsubscribe Rate.

Some of the many benefits that a business can reap from publishing its own newsletter.

1) Get New Customers- Most customers do not buy instantly unless there is a need or if the brand is known to them. In this case, a newsletter allows you to add prospective customers. Generating an email list by asking customers to subscribe to newsletters is the best way of creating a data pool of prospects. Engaging with this data with relevant content would lead to sales & an engaged customer.

2) Staying In Touch – Customers and clients are the lifelines of any business. The newsletter is one of the best ways to stay connected with your customers. Generating a healthy relationship with prospects & existing customers allows businesses to introduce new products, communicate offers/ discounts to convert prospects, up sales, down sale product range & encourage referrals.

3) Get New Customers – Running a powerful referral program can help generate new customers. Referral program not just get new customers, but also helps reward existing customers for their loyalty. A free newsletter allows businesses to educate customers on the business and products offered.  A newsletter thus can be a very simple strategy to turn a one-time visitor into a lifetime customer.

4) Establishing Domain Expertise – Sharing knowledge on the business domain with simple content that provides customers an insight into the business, helps establish a leadership position for the organization. Emailing nuggets of knowledge through your newsletter to deepen relationships with customers and prospects and convince potential customers that you are the answer to their problems. Understand that “No one knows more about your business than you”, which makes you an expert. Likely the construction of your own business has further left you with a great deal of expertise in your field.

Advantages of an electronic newsletter?

An electronic newsletter is just like its paper counterparts. Electronic newsletters deliver written messages that the business what’s to send & communicate to its customers. There are various email marketing tools in the market that are used to send these messages.

Some electronic newsletters are delivered through email and some use web. Most newsletters are delivered in a combination of email & web as it helps to reach the target audience better.

And, how do you publish a newsletter?

One needs to determine a delivery method, which would be a company website or page; creating an archive for older issues, which could mean setting up a blog; and tracking the readers, which likely means setting up a mailing or autoresponder service. However, one can use free tools to do any of these things.