Newsletters

Regular newsletters are a great way to keep in touch with your customers and add value to your relationship. They can be used to convey information, opinions, top tips and offers. But generating a regular stream of information can seem daunting and is one of the major factors that puts businesses off using this valuable sales tool. But it doesn't have to be daunting, all you need is: A great template that looks professional An easy way to generate a constant stream of valuable content Is there really an easy way to produce a continuous stream of content? Keeping your ideas flowing The creation process follows 5 simple steps: Choose 3 topics for the main body of your newsletter (or as many as you wish) If your design has a side bar, find about 3 regular topics to fill it (e.g. recent testimonials, ...

A newsletter is a great way to keep in touch with your customers and add value to your relationship with them. But what on earth do you put in them? How do you keep your subscribers engaged? Here are a few pointers: 1. Timely Tying your newsletter content in with topical events is always a great way to get your new to resonate with your readers. Make sure your content is relevant to the audience you are writing for, your industry and what's happening around you. 2. Problem solving Every issue should offer some sort of help and advice. 'How to' articles, top tips and general advice will add value to your relationship with your readers. Because you are not using your newsletter as a pure sales tool, your readers are far more likely to remain subscribed if they know you will continue to provide them with valuable information ...

Email marketing isn't one of those things you can dabble in when the fancy takes  you and then forget about it. Keeping in touch with your customers is essential, which is why your email marketing activities (what ever form they take) must be regular. Newsletters, email offers and updates are all great and add value to your customer relationships - but think how much better it would be if your customers received emails  that reflected their relationship with you. Matching marketing and relationships A timely targeted email will give a boost to your blossoming relationships. Depending on which stage you are at in your relationship with your customer, your emails can be designed to nurture them and provide help and assistance when they need it. So for example you could use these stages: 1. Welcome Just a simple email ...

Newsletter marketing is a great way to promote your business and add value to your customers - fact. But what happens once you've hit send? Is  your carefully crafted copy forgotten about? Did you know you could use your newsletters to help give your Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) a boost? Newsletters and SEO Surely, my newsletter won't have any effect on my SEO. On its own, no it won't. But think about the content for a moment. It has a strong, compelling subject line (or heading) and the content will be SEO friendly simply because you've written about your products/services, therefore it is going to naturally contact your keywords. So why let all  that valuable content 'die' once you've sent it? Providing a section within your website for your old newsletters will keep that content alive. Plus, you'll be constantly adding fresh content and Google ...

  If I asked you to give me an example of powerful copywriting what you say? Something that catches your attention immediately A headline which draws you in Simple to read copy with lots of headings Hopefully your answer was something along those lines. Powerful copywriting is all of those things. The problem is when some people try to write strong copy they get it all wrong. Bear with me and I’ll explain. Shouting copy A few days ago, I was writing some web copy for a client and my husband was working from home. He works for a German company and deals with a lot of customers located around Europe. That particular day he was engaged on a phone call to one such customer. Instead of his usual voice, I heard a rather strained conversation being conducted in very slow, broken English. He, like many of us, is guilty of adopting the technique of speaking very s-l-o-w-l-y ...

  What kind of success rate are you getting with your email marketing at the moment? Pretty good or could do better? Your electronic marketing strategy should be constantly evolving – test, test and test again until you create the optimum format and content strategy for your audience. Just in case you’re looking for inspiration to inject some new life into your efforts, here are a few tips that might just help you improve your stats. 1. Mobile More and more people are reading their emails from mobile devices so you must find out how your email looks. Not only that but you have to ...

  If you’re an online marketer you need traffic – and a lot of it. Why? Because your traffic is your customers and more customers means more money. How do you actually get more traffic though? And, once you’ve started to get it, how do you convince them to buy from you? There are various things you can do to encourage more people to your website and make it more visible in the search engine rankings. And no, that doesn’t mean plastering it in bright colours with loads of flashing images. Here are 4 ways to help boost your traffic. Remember though, gaining more traffic isn’t going to happen over night. It is something that’s going to require commitment on your part. 1. Keywords This ...

  Keeping in touch with your customers will set you apart from your competition. All too often businesses take your money and wave goodbye. But they’re missing a trick. Regular contact with your customers (and prospective customers) is vital because it keeps you in their mind when they’re in need of your products or services. An effective way of doing that is by producing a monthly newsletter. Newsletter content Many businesses stumble at the first hurdle because they don’t know what to include. Your newsletter can be used to convey great information, industry updates, special offers, announcements, helpful hints—anything that will add value to your customers. Of ...

  Regular communication with  your customers is a great way to keep them informed and to keep your name firmly etched in their minds. One of the most effective ways of doing this is through email marketing.  New subscribers will eagerly await your first email to land in their inbox. They will probably continue to welcome them until, one day, the honeymoon period is over. You will begin to realise your emails aren’t being opened as often (or at all); your messages are now unloved, unopened and unwanted. What do you do? Panic? Send flowers? It’s time to take action. Fighting email marketing ...

  STOP – LOOK – LISTEN Those three words were probably drilled into you when you were a child. You would also do well to remember them when copywriting. That might seem a strange thing to say but when creating sales and marketing content, many people just dive straight in. That’s because it’s usually one of those jobs that is squeezed in between other projects. And there’s the problem – content creation shouldn’t be seen as one of those jobs you have to fit in now and then. It’s vital for your business from an SEO perspective and for getting your message out to ...

  Are you a serial blogger? You know, the type of person who churns out a post, forgets about it and then churns out the next. The content you produce for your blog is very valuable so you must make the most of it. Unlike other forms of communication, a blog post won’t disappear or be used as tomorrow’s chip wrapper. Once you’ve hit ‘publish’ it’s up to you to make the most of that content and keep it alive. If you want a long shelf life on everything you post, follow these 6 simple steps. 1.  Follow up The world is constantly changing so your original ...

  Email marketing is an excellent way to your message out to potentially thousands of people instantly and relatively cheaply. But if you don’t do it right your emails will simply be deleted and remain unopened. So successful email marketing doesn’t start when you begin to compose your email copy, it starts when you begin to devise your strategy. You do have a strategy – right? Step 1 – Back to basics At this point in the process you’ve made the decision to start an email marketing campaign. Great, so what’s next? Well, before you start writing there are a few things you need to think ...

  If you a business owner today the likelihood is that you dabble in email marketing, or at least have started to think about it. Email has opened up a new and effective way of keeping in touch with your customers quickly and relatively cheaply. You can use the emails to give great information, keep them up to date with industry news as well as new products, services and offers. It only takes a few seconds to communicate with thousands of people. Because email marketing is a hot topic, I have written numerous posts about it, such as: How to build your email marketing list Email marketing – Welcome How to be an email spammer

Online marketers are obsessed about search engine optimisation. There’s nothing wrong with that, after all they wouldn’t get anywhere without keywords, backlinks and a decent website structure. But by spending every waking hour worrying about them you could be missing the bigger picture. Google analytics is vital if you want to know what’s going on on your website – where your traffic comes from and the behaviour of your visitors. One of its key stats – even more important than where your visitors come from – is how effective your website is, i.e. its bounce rate. What is bounce rate? The bounce rate shows the percentage of visitors to your website that leave within the first 10 seconds. And that’s not good. If visitors are ...

  You already know how important it is to maintain regular contact with your customers through a regular newsletter—but how easy do you find it to come up with interesting content? Whether you create your own content or hire the services of a freelance copywriter, your newsletter has to provide information that your readers want to read—so that means you mustn’t fill every issue with amazing facts about you. If your newsletter isn’t providing useful information, your readers will unsubscribe. So how can you ensure your newsletter is…well, news-worthy, interesting and giving your readers what they want? How to create a bad newsletter Fill ...