Using Newsletters To Grow Your Business

Have you thought about using a newsletter to promote your business? It’s a great way to engage your customers and increase brand awareness. Even in these days of Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, YouTube, and the countless other Social Media channels that surround us every day, newsletters are still an effective way of communicating with both existing and potential clients.

Newsletters can be used to:

• Offer special promotions
• Keep your clients up to date on what’s happening in your industry – and in your business.
• Inform clients about upcoming events
• Showcase new products or services
• Some of the benefits of newsletters include:
• Increased traffic to your website
• Positioning yourself as an expert in your industry
• Increased sense of trust and reliability
• Increased referrals via newsletter sharing

If you do decide to start sending out newsletters, one word of advice that I would like to offer is to never send them directly from your email account. Unfortunately, many people will use their address book and an email template to send out an email/newsletter campaign. This can cause problems in several areas:

• You can be flagged as a SPAMMER and your email address can become blacklisted, preventing you sending email at all.
• The recipients have no way of “opting-out”, something that is is required by the CAN-SPAM act.
• You run the chance of unintentionally exposing your clients’ email addresses to everyone on your list.
• You cannot track who has opened your email, or what, if any, links were clicked on.

My advice is to always use a third-party newsletter service. These services strictly adhere to CAN-SPAM Guidelines, give you the ability to track how many people have opened your newsletter and what links they have clicked, and run various reports that allow you to gauge how effective your newsletter campaigns are (and how to make them more effective). There are many email/newsletter services, but the one I recommend (and the one I use) is MailChimp. MailChimp offers a fantastic service, including many templates for creating email newsletters, sharing your newsletter via Social Media, tracking opens and link clicks, and a lot more.

They offer a free service for businesses that allows for up to 2000 subscribers and 12,000 email newsletters per month. They also offer paid plans for business that exceed what the free plan allows. If you do decide on one of the paid plans, be sure to use this link and you will immediately save $30.00.

If you would like to chat about using newsletters, feel free to contact me. I’d be more than happy to guide you through the process of setting up your account and advising you on the best ways to send effective newsletters.