If
you are an online marketing veteran, the answer to this question might
be obvious, however, I
get this question A LOT, so if you have been secretly thinking this
question, but afraid to ask….don’t be. Confusing
the purpose of the electronic newsletter with a blog is very common, so
give me a few moments of your time and I will clarify.
An electronic newsletter is
something you send to your existing
list of clients and contacts. It can be sent
straight from your Outlook or e-mail system, but it’s much better if
you use a 3rd party, auto-responder system, like iContact,
Constant Contact, or MyEmma.
Done right, the electronic newsletter is one of the most powerful, cost effective marketing tools you can possibly use. It’s your way of staying top of mind with your clients, potential clients, friends and family, without being intrusive. If you follow the tips below, people will look forward to your electronic newsletter, open and read it often, and are likely to actually forward it to others. My clients who do it well, regularly get multiple inquiries each week, after they send their newsletter. Here are some tips for doing it correctly:
- Be consistent.
Send it once a week, on the same day
of the week, EVERY week, no matter what, even if it happens to be
Christmas. Why? When you are consistent you demand
respect. People believe you are reliable. It speaks
volumes about how you do business.
- Always begin with a
personal greeting. The personal
greeting
makes you a real person to your reader. Your clients want to
work with real people, NOT computers. Differentiate yourself
as much as possible from the online booking engines by always including
a fun, personal greeting at the beginning. Share things about
you and your personal life to let others in. Speak in a way
that you are speaking direct to your reader….not to a crowd.
Don’t EVER address your newsletter with “Dear Friends.”
- Use an auto-responder
service. An auto responder service is
a
3rd party provider that will store your contacts’ email addresses,
provide thousands of beautiful, professionally designed HTML templates,
and allows you to send an email to your entire list of contacts, but
address personally with things like “Dear Diane,”.
As
mentioned above, the auto responder service allows you, without
technical skill, to make your personal newsletter look slick and
p
rofessional,
conveying a powerful message to your reader. If
you simply send an email out of Outlook, it looks sloppy and not
professional. So, check out the ones I recommend today:
iContact, Constant
Contact, or MyEmma.
- Include Excellent,
Helpful Content. Your main article
in your
newsletter should be helpful and interesting….NOT
promotional. You want your readers to look forward to your
newsletter, open and read it, and forward it on to others.
The most effective way to get this result is to always include great
content. Give away your best information and they will come
calling to you for the rest. I promise, this works like a
charm!
- Always include pictures.
It’s almost impossible to get people
excited about travel without good pictures. As we all know, a
picture tells a thousand words, right? People are drawn in by
pictures and will dramatically increase your open rates and click
through rates. You will be putting in a decent amount of time
and effort on this, a little extra effort in finding the best pictures
possible will pay off big time. But here’s another important
piece about pictures. Also
include pictures of YOU,
especially in your personal
greeting at the
beginning. For
example, if you are talking about your son’s baseball game in your
personal greeting, show a picture of you and your son at the
game. You will have to get in the habit of taking pictures
with yourself in the photo. It’s not always easy, but it’s
very worth it.
Your existing clients and others on your newsletter list won’t see your blog posts UNLESS they subscribe to your blog, and most of them won’t. So the blog is really for attracting NEW business, while the electronic newsletter is for staying in touch with existing clients. They are very different purposes…but that doesn’t mean you have to reinvent the wheel all the time.
My advice to my clients who feel too overwhelmed by starting a blog AND a newsletter all at once is this: write 1 article per week and use it for both. Make it 200-500 words. In other words, be sure it’s short and sweet because most people will not read novels. Put this article in your newsletter AND post it to your blog. You have killed 2 birds with one stone.
When you get your system down pat and have a little more time, you could write one or two more articles a week and post those to your blog. But if you can’t get there, just do the one article and do both blog and newsletter. You will see a difference within a few weeks.
