Savvy business owners and marketing professionals are always looking for ways to deepen their connection with existing customers and attract new clientele. In the age of content, newsletters and e-letters are great ways to connect with an audience and good tools for small-to-medium-sized businesses (SMBs) to use for customer engagement.
The key—as with any kind of online communication—is to ensure that the content is relevant to the target audience and that it provides some specific value based on their needs. The content needs to be something your target audience will actually want to read and will find useful. For example, if your newsletter goes to an entrepreneurial audience, content that offers tips and information on how to build business, cut costs, etc., would be of value.
One of the greatest missteps in marketing communications is focusing on you rather than them. You don’t want to fill your content with too much information about you; although a newsletter is definitely a sales tool, it shouldn’t come across as being “sales-y.” If it does, you will lose your audience.
As Bruce Jones points out in a post for Design & Promote, “the content of a good marketing newsletter, apart from being attractive for the target audience, should always be factual and impartial, otherwise it would lose its credibility towards the customers.”
Consumers are savvy, and they don’t want to be tricked into reading advertisements. The focus should instead be to draw consumers to your website through your newsletters, e-letters and, in truth, all of your communication efforts. Look at these communications as a means to draw customers to your marketing platform, as opposed to being “marketing material.” Think “quality content,” not promotion.
Newsletters and e-letters are a great way to connect with your customers, as long as you keep the focus where it belongs. Don’t make your newsletters all about your products and services; that’s a huge turnoff. Instead, think about ways you can provide value, that isn’t easily available elsewhere, to build a strong relationship with your customers.
Recommended Reading:
The Everything Guide to Customer Engagement
Tags: audience engagement, content marketing, Customer Communication, customer engagement, marketing communications, Social Media