Email Impressions
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Email newsletters are a good way of keeping in contact with your clients, and there are a number of benefits in keeping your e-news regular.
- Easy for you to contact all your current and potential clients
- Clients get the latest news about your business
- Reminder of who you are and what you do
- Refer people to your website
- Easy to forward on
- You can see the results
It’s all very easy to write down a bunch of points and leave it at that, but let’s look in a bit more detail about what they mean and how to make them work.
Easy for you to contact all your current and potential clients
Newsletters are designed to be an easy way to get your important information out to current and potential clients, you only write the information once and can send it out to all your subscribers at the same time.
Clients get the latest news about your business
Depending on what your business is you may find you want to let your clients know about new products weekly, fortnightly, or monthly. By sending out a regular email your clients will get to know straight away when you have something new they may be interested in.
Figure out a manageable timeline for yourself to create and send out your e-news, I don’t suggest sending daily e-news, even if you get new products in that often, you don’t want to annoy your clients with excessive emails.
Reminder of who you are and what you do
Don’t get too busy to send out your e-news. One business I came across became involved in testing a new product, and over a period of a few months that is all they focused on. During that time quite a few of their previous clients assumed that they had gone out of business due to the financial crisis because the clients received no communications.
Having your e-news sent at particular intervals lets your clients know you still exist. You can also remind them of services you offer that they may not use regularly and forget about.
Refer people to your website
If you have a new product or service you want people to have a quick overview in your e-news, you don’t want to give them an essay to read each issue. Add links back to your website for more information; give them a snapshot about what’s new and a link to more information and images.
Easy to forward on
I often see products or information in e-news that I subscribe to and think “Hey, I know someone who would love that!” and just forward it on to them. I don’t have to remember to tell them next time I see them or save some mail advertising from the rubbish bin for a week to give it to someone. You can even encourage people to forward your e-news on to others they think might be interested. Don’t forget to have a sign up link as well for people who have received your e-news through a forward.
You can see the results
Although it doesn’t actually cost you anything to send out more or less e-news as it does with a mail-out, you want to see the results; how many people are clicking on links in your e-news to find out more, and when they’re clicking?
If you are just sending out an email from Microsoft Outlook, Yahoo, Gmail or another email program similar to these then finding out who’s clicked on what link and when is pretty much impossible. If your current website is being run by a Content Management System (CMS) you may be able to get an e-marketing module attached and send out and track your e-news through the console area. If you don’t have a CMS or it doesn’t have e-marketing capability then a product like MailChimp would be very useful to you. Other than allowing you to add video of yourself talking to your clients they also track what links within your e-news are being clicked on, how many have been opened or ignored, how many have been forwarded on and a lot more.
Some legal info
There are three things you must do when sending an e-newsletter, all are required by Australian law, but none make your job harder. The three things are Consent, Identify, and Unsubscribe. Below is a quote from http://www.acma.gov.au/WEB/STANDARD..PC/pc=PC_310513 which outlines them clearly.
“Consent – the message must be sent with the recipient’s consent. The recipient may give express consent, or under certain circumstances consent may be inferred from their conduct or an existing business or other relationships
Identify – the message must contain accurate information about the person or organisation that authorised the sending of the message and how to contact them
Unsubscribe – the message must contain a functional ‘unsubscribe’ facility to allow the recipient to opt out from receiving messages from that source in the future. Unsubscribe requests must be honoured within five working days.
A message does not necessarily have to be sent out to numerous addresses to be considered spam. Under Australian law, a single electronic message can be considered spam.”
Consent – If you have a store you can put a contact form on your counter for people to fill out. Let them know on the form that by filling it out they will be subscribing to your e-news.
Add a ‘subscribe to my e-news’ link on your website, this will send their email address straight to you so you know they want to receive your news.
This means that anyone filling out the form is giving you their consent as they know what they are signing up for.
Identify – Using your business logo, colours and adding your contact details to your e-news clearly identifies who you are. You should do these things anyway as part of your overall business image.
Unsubscribe – This one is important, you must always allow people to stop receiving your e-news. If you are using an e-marketing module, MailChimp or another e-marketing product then you should easily be able to add an unsubscribe link and it will do everything automatically. If you are just sending your e-news from Outlook, Gmail, Yahoo etc you can ask them to reply to your email and put ‘unsubscribe’ as the subject so that you know to take their email address out of your subscription list.
