Promoting Your Small Business with Email Newsletters

Despite predictions that various social media platforms would replace email’s central role in the marketing arsenal of small businesses, sending newsletters to subscribers on a consistent basis remains a powerful tool in promoting your company and its offerings.

Email newsletters can provide important benefits to small businesses, such as reinforcing their credibility and expertise with prospects and customers. They also offer a way to stay in touch with customers when they’re not actively doing business with you.

Newsletters can also help you increase your ability to receive referrals, reengage with inactive customers, and upsell to current customers.

If your sales pipeline depends on building and maintaining relationships with prospects and customers, for instance, newsletters provide a targeted, cost-effective way to foster these relationships. If your business depends more on direct sales, email newsletters can similarly provide an effective way to promote specials, community events, or loyalty discounts to engage or reward customers.

Targeted Communications

One of the most compelling benefits about email newsletters is your ability to direct messages to different segments of your potential audience. For instance, instead of a social media post that’s aimed at a broader audience, you have the ability to segment your distribution list, so you send different messages to prospects and current customers.

You can further segment your audience to frequent customers who you want to reward, or past customers you want to reengage. If you operate in different locations, you can also send different messages with each having a varying local emphasis.

Creating Your Content

One of the most consistent questions about developing an email newsletter is wondering what you are going to say. This may depend on whether your goal for the newsletter is relationship-focused or sales-focused, but common approaches for small businesses often include summaries of blog posts or other forms of how-to information, along with promotional announcements.

If you’re an IT consultant, for instance, your email newsletter could include reviews of new productivity tools or other technologies your customers may be interested in. A florist or baker could describe their offerings for an upcoming holiday.

Your content may vary, but it’s helpful to provide a combination of practical and promotional information to give subscribers a reason to open your messages.

Another common question is how often should you send an email newsletter. Although most marketing professionals suggest a weekly frequency, this may not be the best choice if you don’t think you’ll be able to prepare content consistently on a weekly basis. As you are starting out, it may make more sense to experiment with a twice-a-month or monthly newsletter, because it is better to contact customers consistently (even less frequently) than following a seemingly random schedule.

Email Marketing Services

Because sending an email newsletter is more complicated than sending a message to a bunch of people, it’s a good idea to enlist the assistance of an email marketing service to distribute your newsletter.

Email marketing services will help you design and send out your newsletter, develop and maintain your distribution lists, and meet various privacy regulations such as double opt-in and offering unsubscribe options. Services will also offer easy-to-customize templates to give you an important head start in designing your newsletter with a professional look, as well as statistical reports that help you monitor your newsletters’ performance.