E-mail Marketing Tips, Part II

Offer More than One Newsletter

Boosting the Effectiveness of Your Newsletter Campaign

One way to ensure maximum impact from a newsletter campaign, according to experts, is to offer more than one newsletter to your subscriber base. Doing so ensures that you minimize your risk while maximizing your impact.

In the book Sign Me Up! written by Matt Blumberg, Tami Monahan Forman, and Stephanie A. Miller, the authors present the following four arguments for expanding your newsletter publications. (See pp. 30-31)

1. Correctly Targeted Content

You can make assumptions all day about what your customers want. You can analyze their demographic makeup and pick apart their buying history, then make an educated guess about what products or services fit your findings.

Or, you can just ask them!

By providing an option for your customers to specify the type of information they want, you can then create and provide targeted marketing material and information for them. You can write different newsletters appealing to their varying interests and the related categories.

For example, let's say you run a hobby business. Rather than providing a general, catch-all newsletter for your clientèle, you could instead provide a newsletter for those that are interested in radio control models, another one for those interested in plastic models, and a third for announcing special promotions or sales. The idea is that a radio control customer would of course want the newsletter specifically written for him or her, and also be interested in special offers, too.

2. Reduced Lost Customer Risk From Unsubscribing

When your customer base subscribes to multiple newsletters, you reduce the risk of losing them if they should opt out. Let's say the radio-control customer grows tired of your radio-control newsletter, but still wants to keep abreast of any sales or promotions you run. He or she could opt out of one, keep the other, and you benefit by not totally losing your customer.

3. Improved, Quality Content

Of course, you don't want to lose the radio-control subscribers at all. The way to keep them subscribed is by providing good content in your newsletter. By having a focused newsletter, you can now comfortably provide specific, detailed, exhaustive information that a radio-control enthusiast would dearly appreciate, but which would utterly turn off your plastic model customer. Thus, you improve your chances of keeping your customers subscribed by providing expert detail and information they can't get elsewhere without bombarding them with information they find boring or not useful.

4. Increased Frequency of Contact

If you are providing good content with multiple newsletters, you can naturally increase the contact frequency with your customers without alienating them. Striking a balance between too much and too little requires finesse and good judgment. You don't want your customers to forget about you, but you also don't want to annoy them.

Whatever the purpose of your site may be, by providing multiple, targeted newsletters filled with exceptionally good content, you will improve your customer satisfaction rate, reduce unsubscribing frequency, boost your website's popularity, and increase your website's traffic.

HIT Web Design offers an effective tool to create and manage e-mail newsletter campaigns called Stay-N-Touch. For more information, see Stay-N-Touch.

• Provide multiple newsletters for improved reach and reduced opt out.

• Targeted e-mail newsletters allow for better content and greater acceptance.

• Don't guess about what your customers want—ask them!

• Increase the frequency of contact with your subscriber base by using multiple newsletters.