"Every online marketing guru writes about how to produce, create, write, edit, distribute, manage, track and delete newsletters," write Stroll and Halbritter. "Newsletters have been glorified, vilified, amplified, beatified and mystified. They can be modified, crucified, cut-and-dried, country-fried, city-fied and--almost always--justified." Here are their tips for demonstrating value and trust through e-newsletters:
34. Build a targeted reader base. Don't incorporate other mailing lists into your own without permission. This respects the boundaries of your customers and prospects. Your reader base should include people in employees' current email address books as well as sales department prospects, trade show attendees, former clients (you accounting department likely has a list), and industry partners and associations. If someone wants to unsubscribe, do so immediately.
35. Solve problems instead of selling. Traditional advertising forces the recipient of an ad, direct mail newsletter or telemarketer's call to make an immediate choice. Marketers are shouting, "Buy, buy, buy!" without paying attention to what customers and prospects need. E-newsletter marketing, on the other hand, is less intrusive can deliver value regularly. The late advertising guru David Ogilvy once said, "There is no need for advertisements to look like advertisements. If you make them look like editorial pages, you will attract about 50 percent more readers." When you create an e-newsletter, try changing your focus from selling products and services to solving your customers' problems. Think about what they need, and give options they didn't know existed.
36. Inform readers about more than just your company. One dilemma we confront with online marketing is too much information and too little time. The e-newsletter's job is to keep readers on top of trends and the latest industry developments. Include feature stories about major industry occurrences, forward-thinking industry ideas, education on issues or new techniques, and business opportunities. Submit articles from the e-newsletter's editor to trade magazines and industry web sites.
37. Work in concert with your sales team. Email marketing also resembles the sales process. Imagine a business-to-business email campaign unfolding this way: You send a message with a can't-pass-up offer (for example, a free seminar with an industry expert as the speaker). What happens next? You send a round of messages thanking each recipient for signing up, then a message signed by your area sales rep that includes the person's phone number. Once a marketing director begins a campaign online, recipients should fall quickly into the hands of the sales team. The point is to think of your email marketing campaign as just that--a campaign that's staged in a carefully thought-out sequence over a long period of time.
Andrew Brown is an assistant editor at Print Solutions. Darin Painter is managing editor. Email them your comments at bholt@printsolutionsmag.com.
