Emailed newsletters, or ‘e-newsletters’, are as common as junk mail these days. They are fabulous marketing tools because only those who want them subscribe to them. But how often do you sign up to an e-newsletter and never read it? If you’re like me, it’s pretty often.

As a business owner, you can’t neglect your electronic marketing. If you don’t have a ton of cash, there are reliable — and free! — e-newsletter systems. Like the one I use, MailChimp, or the (not free but cheap) one that Clever Starfish offers, Starfish Send.

A good e-newsletter system will let you:

• brand your newsletters to match your website
• test your newsletters before you send them
• split your campaigns to judge the best subject headings, or click-through or open rates (and only send to the best-performing version of your newsletter)
• track results of your campaign
• handle subscribes and unsubscribes automatically
• comply with the Spam Act.

The key to good email marketing is good content

‘Yeah, yeah,’ I hear you sighing. ‘Everybody knows content is king,’ I hear you mumble. Sorry to bang on about it, but it’s true. What does your email newsletter offer that your website or your blog doesn’t?

Let’s say you sell products; then your e-newsletter can offer product updates, latest listings, and special discounts to subscribers. So, what if you’re a service provider? Then in that case you need to do something different, to get people to subscribe, and to keep their attention.

Take my newsletter as an example. My regular posts here offer information and advice, and a bit of excitement about what I’m doing. But my newsletter doesn’t replicate content.

It would be easier, sure. But what is the point of replication? The reasoning behind the Brutal Pixie newsletter is that, if you go to the trouble to subscribe, then you deserve specifically written content. You know the type of thing: dedicated tips, articles written specifically for subscribers, and a bit more fun stuff. Like copywriting catastrophes, for example.

You can always just replicate your content, which makes your life easier and shrinks your to-do list. But put yourself in your subscribers’ shoes. Do you want rehashed content all the time? Probably not. Probably, you’ll just end up deleting the newsletter. Eventually you may muster up the energy to unsubscribe.

And that is a crappy outcome for your business’s marketing campaign, not to mention your overall strategy. It takes thought and a bit of organisation, but doing an e-newsletter properly is well worth the effort.

Click here to subscribe to the Brutal Pixie newsletter, and see whether I can walk the talk — or whether I am maybe just full of hot air.

Tags: e-newsletter, email marketing
Filed under: Marketing