Do you send email newsletters to your clients?
Email newsletters are a great way to reach your customers, but if you’ve been doing it like I have then you’ve been doing it wrong.
Here’s how my email newsletter used to look (Example A)
Example A:
The problem with the example above?
- The email is too long (who likes reading long emails?)
- It looks like it’s from a business (rather than a person)
- There is no logical next step for the recipient
But the main problem with the example above is that it’s only an email – an email that will disappear into an inbox somewhere and never see the light of day again.
On a brighter note, check out my new approach below (Example B)
Example B:
What’s different with this second example?
- It’s much shorter
- It feels like it’s from a person (rather than a business)
- It links to a blog article (instead of having all of the text in the body of the email newsletter)
That’s right, the text that would normally be within the email newsletter is now a blog article instead.
And here’s why this approach is better:
- Website visitors can now read it (not just email subscribers)
- My website now has fresh content (which google likes!)
- It’s easier to ignore (if a recipient that isn’t interested in a particular topic area)
Could your business benefit from this approach?
In most circumstances there’s no reason why your website (and the world) shouldn’t get the benefit of the regular content you’re creating – and it’s as simple as writing helpful blog articles, and linking to them using email.
My only words of caution for this link to article approach are for:
- Retail or price-driven businesses where consumers only need a product name and price
- Sensitive information that you only want your email recipients to read
Hungry for the stats? Here are the results from each of the example campaigns, courtesy of simplemail.co.nz
Example A Statistics: Long email newsletter
Example B Statistics: Short email newsletter linking to blog article
As you can see, the shorter link to article approach creates ‘clicks’, allowing you to see which topics are of most interest to your recipients (so you can write more on those topics!)
