Author: Bethesda Emedia Marketing

Customer engagement is the engine which drives much of online commerce.  There is no easier way to keep in contact with your customers than through the publication of a company Enewsletter.  Creating a successful Enewsletter, however, is often a challenging task for a business.

The reason for this is that most people don’t appreciate the potential for development that such a technical project it becomes when you are trying to influencing buying decisions of readers, increasing brand awareness, and ultimately driving sales of the company’s products.  Business owners often don’t know what to include in such a publication and eventually make the choice to go with poor content that leads to disastrous results.

Things you can do to ensure that your company’s Enewsletter is successful

It is essential that you provide something of value to the reader.  Without some kind of enticement, there is absolutely no reason for someone to read your newsletters.  You can do this a number of different ways:

• Have content that is useful, such as in the form of tutorials or"how-to's," can be enough to attract the attention of readers.

• For the majority of companies, however, a safe choice is to simply offer an exclusive discount or coupon for those subscribed to the newsletter.  Offering this on either a weekly or monthly basis will help to retain and grow the readership, as well as to actually convert those readers into paying customers.

• To get more sign ups, it is often necessary to offer an introductory gift.  This can be in the form of another discount or perhaps a special report related to the website’s content.

Regardless of which strategy you choose to employ, the gift must be important enough to make the average reader hand over their email to your company.

Another important thing to remember is to always respect your readers.  This is especially true when s to how often you should contact them.  Constantly emailing a list of subscribers is one of the quickest ways to cheapen it and eventually make it worthless.

We are all susceptible to information overload.  So there is only so much the average reader can take from one source.

Beyond that, people are just too busy to waste time constantly reading your emails, regardless of how well the content is written or the number of coupons provided. The perceived value of the Enewsletter diminishes when it is published so often.  So instead of writing daily, consider instead sending your Enewsletter a couple times a week publication.  This will give it more weight and respect among the clients and prospects, some of who may actually look forward to receiving their next issue instead of dreading it.  In this form of marketing, it only takes a few percentage points of buyers to have success (assuming all the other factors have been handled correctly).
Remember to have a call to action

Specifically, limit your Call To Action, or CTA, to just one call to action per issue.  Too many and the enewsletter comes across as one big infomercial filled with spam links.

Without asking the buyer to take a specific action, nothing may happen.  Your potential customer may simply find the newsletter to confusing.  The result, they won't follow through by clicking back to your company’s website for additional information or to purchase.

It is the job of the writer to implicitly ask the reader to become a customer. 

While such a call shouldn’t be too direct, at the same time it shouldn’t be so vague as to simply not register with the reader.   Understanding the balance between the two takes some time, but it is definitely a skill worth improving on and constantly testing in order to produce more sales and increased clicks.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR:  

Bethesda Emedia Marketing is headed by David S. James, the President. The company was founded over 10 years ago to serve the Association, Publishing and General Business Mailer community. With it's "Full Enewsletter Service" providing all the technical parts of the Email transmission and a "Do It Yourself" service, Bethesda Emedia has proven to be a reliable partner for many organizations.  Additional information is available at http://bethesdaemediamarketing.com

Bethesda Emedia Marketing is owned by Bethesda List Center, Inc, of Bethesda, Maryland.  The company is now in it's 22 year of list management and list brokerage.  The company serves the Association, Medical and Life Science, Publishing, Information Technology (IT) and Software Companies and other Business Service Providers.

Image courtesy of (Stuart Miles) from freedigitalphotos