One of the best ways to keep in touch with your customers is to use a newsletter. It can be in print or online or both. But, it’s important to have one and to use it consistently.
Your newsletter should provide valuable information your customers will be interested in reading. The content should not be you boasting about how good your product or service is. No one, except maybe you, wants to read that. High-quality targeted content is what people want. Provide that and they will wait drooling with anticipation for your newsletter to arrive each time.
How often should you send it? It can be four times a year, or once a week. I’d recommend between once a week and once a month. If you email too often your customers will feel bombarded. Wait too long and they’ll start to forget you and feel they don’t really need you.
Of course, you can and should include content and ideas that lead to and support the reason why the customer should buy from you. A newsletter is an excellent way to promote a special sale, an event, a new product and so on. Tell them they should buy your product from you, but give them a good reason why they should. And do it in a way that they don’t feel bullied. You want them to feel they are being presented with an excellent offer that they would benefit from by acting on now.
As mentioned previously, autoresponders are one of the best ways to deliver a newsletter to your customers. It can be personalized and it’s cheap. Going one step further you can create different variations of your newsletter based on the kind of customer.
You may have one format with content for a certain segment of your customers and another format with different content for another.
Autoresponders will allow you to automate all of this.
They’ll also provide valuable data such as who opened the email and clicked on a link, etc. By looking at these reports you’ll know what is working and what isn’t.
Testing is the key. Keep testing and tweaking until your newsletter is honed to maximum effectiveness – that is, it generates the most feedback, leads, and it sells the most.