Creating a company newsletter is a great way to stay in touch with your customers and others who may be interested in your company’s offerings. In fact, 80% of retailers tout email marketing as their most effective customer retention tactic. It’s easy to build your newsletter mailing list from your existing customers, since you probably already have their emails in a database or a customer relationship management (CRM) platform.
[Read more: A Beginner’s Guide to Creating and Managing an Email Marketing List]
Ideally, though, your newsletter will reach more than just your existing customers and will be effective in drumming up new business for your brand. That’s why you’ll want to develop a marketing strategy to promote your customer newsletter. Fortunately, there are many ways you can promote your company newsletter to not just your website visitors, but your social media network, in-store visitors and other connections.
If you’re just starting out, especially if you don’t have a big marketing budget, you may want to try a few of these tactics, evaluate your results and then either ramp up your efforts or try something different if you don’t see the response you want.
Set up a landing page for opt-ins
The first step in promoting your company newsletter is creating a form so people can opt in to receive it. Most email marketing programs allow you to create a landing page—sometimes with a branded URL—that you can share.
This landing page should be consistently branded to match your other marketing materials, including the same logos, colors and fonts you use on your website (and signage if you have a brick-and-mortar location).
[Read more: A Beginner’s Guide to Branding Your Business]
The page should include a few sentences about what value your company newsletter provides to readers and then a place for people to enter their names and email addresses. Once users opt in, the landing page should redirect to a “thank you” page, so people know they submitted their information correctly and can look forward to getting your next newsletter.
Add a widget to your website
Just as you display your social media profiles on your website so people can connect with you, it’s a good idea to add a widget in a high-profile spot asking visitors to sign up for your newsletter. Use a call-to-action that promises them something good. For instance:
- Read the latest news.
- Get deals delivered to your inbox.
- Be the first to hear about new launches.
You can also entice people to sign up for your newsletter by offering them a coupon off their next purchase if they sign up.
If you aren’t promoting your newsletter to your followers and connections on social media, you’re missing a big opportunity.
Use a pop-up on your website
According to a study from Sumo, the best pop-ups on websites have a conversion rate as high as 9.28%, with most having an average of just over 3%. In spite of pop-up blockers growing in prevalence, pop-up sign-up forms can be very effective for those consumers they reach.
The trick is in the timing. You don’t want your form to pop up immediately. The experts at Endless Gain, a website optimization company, recommend sharing your pop-up once the visitor reaches half of the average time on the page. For instance, if most visitors stay on your landing page for roughly 30 seconds, you want the pop-up to appear after 15 seconds.
[Read more: Website Design: What Makes a Great User Experience?]
You can also have your pop-up form appear just as the user is about to navigate away from the site, catching their attention right as they click to leave. Keeping the forms to a minimum—such as asking only for name and email—can also improve conversions. And, as with any marketing tactic, you’ll want to A/B test your results to determine what works best for your audience.
Promote your newsletter at your brick-and-mortar location
If you own a restaurant, a retail operation or a service with a brick-and-mortar location, don’t neglect the opportunity to reach your target audience in the real world. Incorporate signage with the address to the opt-in page for your newsletter, or print it on receipts, menus or business cards.
You can also generate a QR code that, when scanned, takes people directly to your landing page to subscribe to your newsletter and display it at your point-of-sale or on menus.
Ask readers to share your newsletter
If you already have a captive audience for your newsletter, why not ask them to help you spread the word? Data analysis platform CBInsights has a link at the bottom of its newsletters that says, “Share with a friend.” Clicking the link takes you to a form that asks for your friend’s name and email, along with your name and email address. It also allows you to include a brief note to your friend about why the newsletter is worth reading. By asking for this data, CBInsights can track which newsletters get shared the most and also find brand evangelists that share newsletters most frequently.
Use social media to promote your newsletter
If you aren’t promoting your newsletter to your followers and connections on social media, you’re missing a big opportunity. At the very least, you want to share your newsletter opt-in landing page in your social media profiles and create some engaging posts or feeds around your newsletter content.
[Read more: A Guide to Growing Your Business with Social Media Marketing]
But you can also leverage data from your subscriber mailing list to create paid social campaigns that target look-alike audiences, or people in the same demographic as the majority of your subscribers.
If you’re taking the time to generate interesting content regularly, you want to be sure you have people reading it. Growing your newsletter subscriber list is one way to reach a larger audience and build your brand.
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