The rules of engagement
The online marketplace is a tough arena. Even when you’re dealing with a group of interested parties – your contacts who’ve subscribed to your newsletter, and are familiar with what your business does – it’s still hard to grab their attention for more than a few seconds.
In terms of stats, anything over 20%, in terms of the amount of hits you receive for particular links to stories on your newsletter, is decent. But achieving this figure can be difficult at first.
If you’re finding it hard to reach this target, bear in mind that you need to treat your newsletter as just that. It’s a round-up in a news bulletin format of what your company’s been doing of late, how it’s been doing it, and ultimately, how these business developments will benefit your customers.
This means getting a little bit creative – coming up with catchy headlines for your stories, and making sure the copy you write is interesting is a bit of a must to get your readers reading. Keep these short – no more than 55 characters – and keep them interesting. As with newspaper copy, a clever use of puns is still a popular online tool – just don’t get too clever and risk alienating your readers if they can’t understand what you’re getting at!
Engaging your readers is also crucial, whether this is through a survey in the actual newsletter copy, or via questions you’re posing in your newsletter. For example, you might be focusing on helping your readers to understand something new that’s happened in your industry, rather than trying to sell them one of your services, by directing them to a blog entry that you’ve written discussing it on your site. In which case, you’ll need to pose a question, asking readers what they think – is a new piece of legislation a good thing or not, for example? - as you direct them to your website.
The next spin-off from this point is to direct readers to your Facebook or Twitter pages if they’d like to continue with the debate elsewhere. This is also a good opportunity to promote your social media tools with your readers to show them what they may be missing by not ‘liking’ your page on Facebook, or by following you on Twitter. If you’re using social media to promote your services, say so in your newsletter – you can offer a free service for a certain time period to the 100th person who likes your Facebook page, or to your 1,000th follower on Twitter.
So, what do your readers most like about your newsletters? Why not share your tips with us below?
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