The art of a great e-newsletter
A great e-newsletter for your business or organisation can be created by
- Having a great story to tell
- Having useful information to share
- Giving joy
A great e-newsletter is rarely created by having a great deal, discount or special.
Great Story to Tell
Not-for-profit organisations, charities and political movements do this very well.
Useful Information to Share
Service businesses are able to share useful information with their clients through a regular newsletter. Most of them don’t for numerous reasons ranging from not wanting to give their valuable knowledge away for free to not wanting to spam people to believing that no-one will read it anyway.
Giving Joy
Churches, entertainers and artists are able to share joy with their members and supporters. Businesses who can find a funny side to their line of work may also be able to find something here.
Deals, Discounts and Specials
Retailers are in the difficult zone and most fall back on sending emails that have deals, discounts and specials. While this type of email can work, as a regular newsletter it usually, eventually falls flat. Finding a way to tell a story or share useful information or give joy will increase readership.
Why do an e-newsletter?
Many businesses over-estimate the nuisance factor of email marketing and under-estimate it’s value. Email marketing can be a very valuable marketing channel for businesses, especially if done well. Your clients can learn more about you and the services you offer. A regular e-newsletter will keep your business name top of your client’s mind.
What is an e-newsletter?
An e-newsletter is a regular email (often once a month) sent to clients and customers with several articles. An e-newsletter is not an email sent here and there with no regular schedule. An e-newsletter is not an email that only has one topic or one article.
What is an EDM?
An email with no regular schedule and with one topic is often called an EDM, or email direct marketing piece. It has a place in a business email marketing strategy, but that place is not all the time and not to the exclusion of an e-newsletter.
Why differentiate between an e-newsletter and EDM?
An e-newsletter, with its regular schedule, forces the writer of the email to find content that is valuable to their clients and customers. The writer needs to go looking for information that will bring joy, be valuable or is an interesting story to tell. It invites the writer to think about what their reader will like and benefit from.
An irregular EDM almost always ends up being at a time that suits the business and will be the launch of a new product or service, a discount or deal or other update that is focussed on the business’s need to get something known as opposed to the readers needing to receive something interesting.
As a business there are times you really do want to tell your clients about the launch of a new product or a great deal – by all means if you have a subscriber list send this email to them. But if every email that lands in their inbox from your business is focussed this way there’s a high likelihood that open rates and readership rates will slowly decline.
Basic Business Email Marketing Strategy
A basic business email marketing strategy requires two things
- A good, clean and growing subscriber list
- A regular newsletter
A subscriber list takes time to organically grow. You might start with 50 people. Time spent growing the list and keeping it maintained is time well spent.
A regular newsletter requires good content with good ideas to share. This is now easier than it’s ever been before. If you haven’t yet tried it, put a prompt into ChatGPT and see what it suggests. Here’s some example prompts
- 5 article ideas for a plumbing newsletter
- 5 article ideas for a jeweller’s newsletter
- 5 article ideas for a fashion boutique
Other Email Marketing
Other email marketing techniques are EDMs as we’ve previously mentioned. Email Funnels are also a popular technique as are sending welcome email(s).
For most businesses our recommendation is to get the basic newsletter in place and work on more advanced email marketing techniques if and when the time seems right.
MailChimp Newsletter Course
Learn how to upload your list and create your e-newsletter in MailChimp. Especially suitable for business-to-business and not-for-profits.
Step-by-step videos with screenshots, examples, explanations and demonstrations.