Newsletter Guru | elmail.co.uk

If you were the head of a Travelling Agency, you would like people to use you for their travels. If yes, one of the things you have to do to make that happen is to create a newsletter where you tempt people with your perks and dreamy destinations.

There are many travel agencies to compete with – and it is very important to stand out from the crowd. This is not an easy thing to do since all travel agencies offer similar products.

What You Can Do

One of the most important things to include in a newsletter is photos. What better way to show what you can offer than with photos that are so beautiful that even a sofa would want to travel? Photos of destinations, food, and cultural events will surely improve the quality of your newsletters. Still, it is important not to overuse photos because emails with too many colours and banners often look like spam mail. It has to look like a proper and serious newsletter, so your agency looks proper and serious.

It is also recommended that you be simple and clear. If you send emails after emails with long and complicated sentences, your recipients would eventually stop reading the newsletters because it has become a tiring and boring exercise.

However, if you make it more fun it can capture them in a way that can make them loyal forever. Another thing to make it more personal is to avoid a no-reply email address. If you give your readers the opportunity to answer your newsletter mail, it is easier to develop and maintain a personal relationship with them. In this way, they can answer you directly from your newsletter mail, and ask questions.

Subject Line and Grammar

The first thing you read when you get emails is the subject line. Therefore, you have to choose your subject words carefully and wisely. The words have to entice your recipient into opening your email and reading it. You can find many tips on this subject on the Internet. It can also be smart to focus on exotic destinations that require much planning and include as much information as possible to give the best tips.

You have to remember that the market is constantly changing, and you have to keep up with these changes so that you can offer the best possible value. Your grammar also has to be top notch because it helps a lot with the trust of the recipient, and you look like a more serious provider.

Experience

There is a reason why TripAdvisor has become a very popular application and website lately. People tend to trust others who have experience more than companies who are trying to sell their expertise. This is very understandable since people with experience are more reliable and objective than an agency that is trying to sell their product.

The people who write reviews on TripAdvisor only do this to give advice and ideas to others, and there is no money-making agenda behind it. That is why it can be wise to include experiences in your newsletters instead of only regular recommendations as this also enhances your relationship with the clients.

There is one thing to send a great email to your subscribers. Another skill is to get people to give you their email. In today’s world where people are bombarded with so much information they might be reluctant to sing up for another subscribers list.

There are many different approaches to getting people to sign up to your email subscription. Some are more aggressive and some others more relaxed. Whats best is always depending on the situation though. Its usually hard today to get peoples attention though in a smooth way since everybody else is pushing it really hard.

One nice way to promote your subscribers list is to have a email sign up box. It can easily be put in the sidebar of your homepage. People that visit your site will then see it and can easily sign up if the want to. Its not at all a pushy way to promote your news letter.

Some company’s are a bit more aggressive though. They make a little window pup up where they ask you you sign up. Usually the say it some great promotions they will send you if you do sign up and of course sometimes they will do that as well. The annoying thing can be when you are on a sell phone and it gets a bit tricky to close that window. Meanwhile all you wanted to do was read some information on their website.

The conclusion of it all is that there is no ultimate road to have you do get your customers to share their email with you. What we do know is that different things work on different people and things work in different way depending on what market you operate in.

It can probably be said though that the more long term relationship with the customer might be better off if you don’t push them with to much things. The key word is to still give them information about things that they can appreciate. They don’t want to open your emails once a day and never see anything they care about. That will quickly turn bad for your company since they in the end will stop even looking at your emails.

One thing is for sure though. Subscribers are worth money for your company these days. Companies have been sold for big numbers lately where there is no profit making at all. They just get paid because the have a customer base that are registered with them. When they get paid a lot for these kind of things its also taken into consideration how well the relationship is as well with their members. If they are going to get paid well it of course has to be a good relationship.

Newsletters can be rejected by readers if they don’t conform to their interests. Sometimes they can be flagged as spam messages simply because they lacked relevance. For this reason, authors of newsletters spend hours coming up with interesting topics and content that will not only be engaging to the customer, but will also be a reasonable way to get started and access the web shop.

Motivate existing customers

There are various characteristics that should be observed and maintained when drafting a newsletter that will motivate existing customers to log in and find out whether you have anything new for them. The first characteristic is trust building. Even though you might have thousands of registered members on your site, it is not enough. If you do not maintain a professional business setup, these thousands might turn to hundreds and the numbers continue to dwindle until you improve your services and customer care. Trust building can be achieved by adding first hand confessions from another existing customer. This is because customers who have just signed in would rather hear it from someone who has used your services than take your word for it. Another step is responding promptly and politely to every query, no matter how small. A quick response always builds trust because it implies that you care.

Every step is a new opening, which means that you need to create an atmosphere where your customer doesn’t get the feeling that he or she is being tricked into becoming a returning customer. For this, confidence can be established by adding credibility to the newsletter. A feedback from one of the customers will be sufficient enough to address this interest, but at the same time, the author needs to showcase the value of the web shop to the customer. Note that your products and services have a particular target, which means not every person out there should be given the chance to sign up and enjoy them.

KISS (Keep it Simple Stupid)

Besides making your newsletter memorable, you should avoid overdoing it. In other words, explaining too much of how the customer will find it great to join and shop with you might get too boring. Instead of all that, you need to focus your prospects for the future. Generally, the more reasons you provide for the customer to help them keep reading, the better are your chances that the customer will find the newsletter a useful tool to buying your products or services that he or she needs. Authors who have incorporated certain advantages such as educating the reader about the web shop and in particular emphasizing the nature of the products end up earning the readers interests.

Like any other marketing tool, whether online or on the ground, a call to action is very important whereby you let the reader know that they can always reach out directly through a particular contact for any questions about the newsletter, which of course will be addressed within the shortest time possible. While you can send the same email to multiple customers, based on their previous performance and problems that they may have undergone, it is highly recommended that you tailor a particular newsletter to a given customer. For instance, a “We Miss You newsletter” for customers that haven’t shopped in a while is very common these days.

Newsletters by email are a modern continuation of the newsletters by post. These would get sent out to existing customers and would be customized only by adding the name of the customer on the cover letter. The design would vary according to what company was doing the promotion.

Give the customers what he/she wants

Mail order companies would usually send out product information to better acquaint the customer with what they had on offer. This would normally arrive in the shape of a catalogue of the goods offered. These days, most of this information is available online which means there is less need for glossy catalogues with attractively lit pictures of products and clothes. Instead, these pictures go online in a web shop that is ideally easily searchable for the customer, enabling him or her to immediately zone in on what he or she wants. This is good in that it enables the customer to immediately find and check out the required item. The downside is that the customer is no longer exposed to the entire range of products that your company offers. In the old days, flipping through the catalogue would give customers the opportunity to identify wants and needs they may not previously have thought of.

Therefore, it is important for web shop newsletters to try and incorporate the idea of increased exposure in their emails. Once a customer has signed up to a site, bought an item and chosen to subscribe to the newsletter the web shop needs to customize the offers it sends the customer for best possible results. A customer will not want random items marketed to him – if he bought a lawnmower, he is probably not interested in a silk dress. If you have a large range of products it is important that you tailor your offers. Your customer has bought a lawnmower – perhaps he is interested in other gardening tools? Alert him to these offers. A good example is Amazon, that regularly updates customers about for example book releases that the customer might like based on what they have previously bought from the book store. This has the added benefit of keeping the customer up to date while simultaneously increasing sales.

Less is more

So much for structuring your offer, but what about the design? Simple is always better. An overcomplicated HTML-coded email with lots of pictures, links and sidebars will only serve to confuse the customer. The best way of grabbing someone’s attention is to employ the “less is more” approach. Keep the background nice and plain, use a minimum of pictures (most email clients will block them automatically anyway). Use a nice readable web font like Verdana or Arial. Send only a few offers, but make them stand out. Your lawnmower-buyer is much more likely to respond positively to an email that lists a small number of high quality products that may be on sale than an email that lists 2000 items. At the same time, an email that simply states “click here to find more gardening tools” is also not going to get a lot of attention. Do the work for the customer – identify what they want and then make it easy for them to get to the desired item with one click. That will net you sales.

A sales letter remains a necessary tool in online marketing of your corporate blog or webshop. Regardless of your business or clientele, there are various things you should avoid when crafting a newsletter aimed to motivate customers to sign up with you or order more from your webshop.

One of the most important qualities in a good sales letter is that it will attract even those people who might not otherwise have considered ordering more for you or continuing with the signing up process. Therefore, the subject needs to be engaging, catchy and promising. But if the subject doesn’t address the customer directly, he or she will not be bothered to open and read the rest of the newsletter. In fact, they might end up deleting it without a second thought.

Keep the customers updated

“What Is In It For A Customer?” this is a key aspect when writing a newsletter. You cannot just start writing generally about how your web shop or casino is doing. You need to narrow it down to how your success – or indeed failure – may benefit the customer. A round of generous bonuses? A competition with truly awesome prizes? A generous discount on a particularly popular brand? Have there been problems for clients, such as problems with payment processing or software glitches? In the latter case, it is a good idea to write about how you have addressed it. Be careful how you phrase it though, and where in the newsletter you place it. If you start writing your newsletter and the first thing you mention are the downfalls of your business, and your recent measures to improve its performance, a few will be interested in that but more will see it as a weakness and will not be bothered to read on.

For this reason, the effectiveness of the sales letter and the fact that the reader will be prompted to open it will not only be determined by eye catching topic but also a well focused header. The first sentence should provide a clear idea to the reader of how he or she will find your site lucrative – especially when compared to competitor sites. Overall, the trick is aiming everything to the customer’s interests and thus you will be able to execute a sale!

Get to the catch

There should always be a “catch” in a newsletter where you spend a few minutes explaining to the reader the benefits that will come along as they take a few minutes to read what you have in store for them. This means that the more time you spend highlighting your recent business performances in terms of profits and how you desire to share them with your customers, the better.