3 BIG Secrets of Profitable Newsletter Marketing
Here are 3 huge secrets with you about newsletter marketing that will bring you success.
#1: Newsletters help you keep customers.
As I have said repeatedly, it’s far more costly to acquire new customers than it is to retain your existing ones. A good newsletter program helps you create relationships with your customers.
When you share information in your newsletter, you build trust and establish rapport. When you share valuable information, your customers will actually look forward to receiving your newsletter.
Plus it helps you stay top-of-mind with them. As soon as they receive it, they’re thinking about you and your company. Issue after issue, you build stronger relationships with your customers.
#2: Newsletters help you get new customers.
Good, informative articles give your newsletter what marketing pros call “pass-along” value. When a customer passes along one of your newsletters to a friend, relative, or colleague, you get a referral. Your customers don’t simply hand over your newsletter.
They’ll hand it over with a statement like, “Charlie, you have got to read this. I read this article and know it will help you as well. An XYZ Company is great. I deal with them all the time.”
People read newsletters as publications, not as marketing pieces, so they’re more receptive to the information they contain…including information about your company and what you offer. When faced with blatant marketing materials like brochures and sales literature, most readers work to block the information, because we’re all too inundated with advertisements every day.
But when newsletters offer articles and valuable information, they’re more likely to be read, remembered, and passed along.
#3: Newsletters help build credibility.
When people read your brochure, they read it as advertising and are naturally resistant to the message. However, when they read your newsletter, they read it like a publication, and the message gets through.
You can share tips and stories about how others benefited from your product or service. Include statistics and testimonials. They help build credibility.
Strategy for Success – Risk Reversal
Risk reversal is one of my all-time favorite profit-boosting strategies. When I coach entrepreneurs and small business owners, I always discuss the importance of risk reversal; however, it’s critically important when you are starting your business.
When you are starting out, you really don’t have a track record about which to boast to your prospects. Chances are also good that you have no testimonials yet. Your prospects have no reason to trust you, and skepticism is high on the list of reasons customers don’t say yes to your product or service. Zig Ziglar always emphasized that one of the five main obstacles to a sale is the lack of trust.
Many entrepreneurs and business owners believe that prospects don’t buy because of price.
High price is rarely the reason a prospect doesn’t buy even from a long-standing or well-established business. Customers don’t buy from businesses that they don’t know, like, and trust, and the best way to build trust is to reverse the risk.
You’ve probably had your own experience with warranties and know that the product will invariably stop working the day, week, or month after the warranty expires. Prospects will hesitate to buy because of that “what if” factor. What if it doesn’t work? What if it doesn’t deliver as promised?
What if I’m not satisfied? It’s up to you to eliminate that concern. And you can do that by reversing the risk. That is, you, as the business owner, assume all risk associated with the purchase of your product or service.
It’s not good enough to offer a 30-, 60-, or 90-day warranty. Your prospect will still be worried about what happens if something goes wrong on the 91st day or even 120th day. If they’re wondering about that, they’re going to hesitate to buy, especially from someone running a relatively new or just-launched business. Make your guarantee ironclad and super strong, and you will show that you are completely confident in what you are offering.
When you are completely confident in your product or service, you have nothing to lose by offering a rock solid guarantee. Quite the opposite. You have everything to gain: more sales and higher profits.
Pay Attention to the Pain Points!
No matter how much your customers like you, they’re really buying the solutions you offer, and they’re buying to eliminate their pain points. Remember that your product or service must be of some benefit to them and make their lives easier and/or more enjoyable and potentially relieve some of their pain. After all, every single one of us has the same favorite radio station: WII-FM (What’s In It for me?).
For an auto repair shop, the customers’ pain point is often the inconvenience of getting their cars serviced. They have to drop off the car, and then find a ride to get home or to work. If there was a trustworthy mechanic who offered this service, it would be exactly the solution most customers needed, and it would ease their pain point. Now, if that same auto shop washed and vacuumed the car in addition to servicing it, that would be over-the-top customer service—and certainly worthy of much word-of-mouth advertising!
Know Your Target Audience
Knowing exactly who your target audience is and knowing your market are more important than the product you sell or the service you offer. Please re-read that sentence: Knowing exactly who your target audience is and knowing your market are more important than the product you sell or the service you offer.
Don’t skimp over this aspect of building your business plan. You want to know with intense hyper clarity and specificity who your perfect target customer is. You should know how old they are, their gender, their occupation, the type of neighborhood they live in. Why? If you don’t know this information, you will never reach them with any type of marketing you do.
When writing or shooting videos, actually think about and picture a single person, not the thousands of people you expect to reach. Keep their image in your head and have a one-on-one conversation with them. Some marketers post a photo of the person who most represents their target audience next to their desks while they’re writing copy or devising marketing plans.
All great marketing should be one-to-one communication. We all want to be special and be the center of attention. Your customers, clients, or patients want to be the focus of your message. That won’t happen if you handle your marketing (whether you’re writing copy, shooting videos, tweeting, or posting on social media) as if you are addressing everyone on your list at the same time, whether your list contains 100 or 100,000 names. Target the message to a single individual – the right individual.
Spend More Time Looking Through the Windshield than in the Rearview Mirror
As an entrepreneur, it’s vitally important to focus most of your time with your eyes looking “down the road” – into the future. Day in and day out, as busy business owners, we spend much of our time meeting and hopefully exceeding our current customers’ expectations.
But it’s equally important that we spend time looking into the future, trying to anticipate the inevitable changes in the marketplace, so we can best determine not only what products and services our customers will want, but also how they will want to receive them.
You may have a successful, thriving business today, but failing to change and adapt your business to meet your clients’ new and ever-changing preferences is a sure recipe for failure.
However, it is also always good, especially at year’s end, to take a few minutes to look in the rearview mirror to take stock of where your business has been and what you’ve accomplished.
Take time to review what worked well, what didn’t, and perhaps why. But while it’s true that we can learn a lot from history (looking in the rearview mirror), don’t spend too much time there – because the future is going to unfold in front of you!