The more avenues you have to contact your clients through, the better. You know all about marketing through your social media pages, but one tool you may not have even considered — your email!
Email marketing is a great way to stay at the top of your clients’ minds, even when they’re not browsing social media. Creating a monthly email newsletter is a great place to start! What can an email newsletter do for your business? Let’s discuss!
Why Should I Have a Monthly Email Newsletter?
Email marketing helps you keep your audience up to date on what’s going on with your business. You can let everyone know what you have coming up over the next few weeks, ensure you stay at the top of their minds, and hopefully, get some more sales in the process!
The key to email marketing is organization and consistency. It’s generally a good idea to send your email newsletter to clients monthly — either the first or last few days of each month.
When your clients know when to expect your message in their inbox, they can set time aside each month to read through it and learn all about what you have to offer!
What Should My Email Newsletter Include?
As a general rule, your monthly newsletter should be 90% educational and only 10% promotional.
The people on your email list are typically already clients of yours — you don’t need to persuade them to work with you, you just need to let them know what you have in store for them!
It’s best to break your newsletter down into three sections:
● What’s new with your business — This can be new products you have dropping soon, updates to your business model, or anything else you think is relevant.
● Upcoming promotions or events — Starting a sale soon? Hosting an in-person or virtual event? Let people know about them to build interest!
● What’s new with you — Quick, personal updates about you let your clients get to know you better and help you build lasting relationships.
Whatever you include, make sure it’s relevant, easy to understand, and interesting!
Elements of a Successful Email Newsletter
The exact content of your newsletter will depend on the type of business you’re running, what new updates you have, and how much you want to let your clients into your personal life.
But, there are a few general elements that all email newsletters should include!
● Good spelling and grammar
● Short, interesting subject lines
● Consistent, simple design
● Mobile-friendliness
● An easy unsubscribe link
Seem like a lot to remember? Don’t panic! Let’s break down each of these five points…
Good Spelling & Grammar
We’ve all received them before — emails from clear scammers or spammers full of misspelled words, poor grammar, and inconsistent capitalization.
Incorrect spelling and poor grammar are telltale signs of an email you definitely don’t want to open, so before you send out your monthly newsletter, run it through a spelling and grammar check on Grammarly.com.
Correct any misspellings, inconsistent spacing, or other signs of poor grammar that could push your newsletter into your clients’ spam folders.
Short, Interesting Subject Lines
A lot of capital letters and strange punctuation marks in the subject line will scare off your clients. But, you still want to make sure you catch your subscribers’ attention right from the start!
Research has shown that 40 characters or less is the optimal length for an email subject line — anything more, and it could get cut off in clients’ inboxes.
Make it short enough that subscribers can see the full title, but interesting enough to ensure they open the email.
The best rule of thumb is to take the newsletter's main “selling point” and pop it in the subject line.
For example, let’s say you’re offering 20% off on all orders for the month of February. You could write, “February Updates: Take 20% Off!”
This 31-character subject line lets your subscribers know two things before they even open the email:
This is the February newsletter.
You’re offering some kind of discount on your products or services.
Something like this will pique your subscribers' interest, and your clients will be much more likely to read through the entire newsletter to learn more!
Consistent, Simple Design
Consistency is key in almost all areas of running a small business — including the design of your email newsletter!
Ideally, you’ll use the same template each time you send your emails. All the colors, fonts, and sizes will be the same — the only thing that will change is the content inside.
Fill your newsletter with all the pertinent information you have to offer clients for the month. Make sure to leave enough white space so it’s easy to differentiate between different sections and points.
Most of the text you use should be standard size, an easy-to-read font, and black in color. But, bolding and changing the color of hyperlinks will make it easier for clients to tell what is and isn’t a link.
Product photos can definitely enhance the look and feel of a monthly newsletter, but too many images can make it look cluttered. Use images only as necessary, and make sure to include a description of each image in a smaller font underneath.
Some people adjust their settings, so images embedded in an email don’t show, so you need to make sure the point still comes across without the image there.
Mobile-Friendliness
Today, most people check their inboxes primarily from their smartphones and tablets. To keep up with this trend, you need to make sure your newsletters format correctly on ALL platforms.
The easiest way to test this is to send a copy of your newsletter to yourself before sending it to your clients.
Open it on your phone, tablet, and computer — every device you have available. If it doesn’t look the way it should on any of these platforms, go back and make adjustments until it’s easy to read on all of them.
An Easy Unsubscribe Link
In a perfect world, all your newsletter subscribers would continue reading and interacting with your emails for the life of your business. But unfortunately, that's just not realistic.
Perhaps their interests have changed, or maybe they’ve found another similar business they like working with more. Whatever the case may be, there will be times when some of your clients no longer want to receive emails from you.
In situations like these, it’s essential that people can easily unsubscribe from your mailing list.
If there’s no way to do so, or if they can’t figure out how, they’ll either begin deleting your newsletters before they open them or mark them as “Spam” — both of which can be detrimental to your open rates.
If enough people mark your messages as "Spam" or delete them without opening them, their mailing platform may flag your email address.
Eventually, this will cause mailing platforms to automatically push your newsletters into your clients’ Spam folders, where they’ll sit until they’re deleted.
This is never a good scenario, so it’s essential that people can easily unsubscribe when they want to.
If you use an email marketing tool to send out your newsletter, an unsubscribe link will likely be automatically included at the bottom of all your emails. If you create and send out your newsletter manually, you’ll need to do it yourself.
You could have a small line of text at the bottom that says, “Reply ‘Unsubscribe’ to this email to be removed from my mailing list,” or you could create a Google Forms link and have the user type in their email address so you can remove them.
How Do I Get Clients to Subscribe to My Emails?
Now that you know what your email newsletter should include, it's time to talk about arguably the most important part — finding people to send your newsletter to!
The first thing to try is directly asking clients if they’d like to sign-up for your newsletter when you meet with them. If they agree, take down their email and add them to your mailing list.
Another method is to promote your newsletter on your social media profiles. Let clients know what benefits they’ll get by signing up, then add a link they can click to add their email to your mailing list!
However you get your clients to sign up for emails, ensure they know what to expect before signing up. Some of the information you should provide them with is:
● What information the newsletter will give them
● When they should expect to receive emails from you
● What email address they will see in their inbox
When clients know exactly what they’re getting into before giving you their email address, you can ensure that the only people who are signing up are people who actually WANT to receive these types of emails from you.
Plus, when they know what email address the newsletters will be coming from, they can whitelist it to ensure it’s never pushed into their Spam folder!
Email Marketing: A Tool for Success in Small Business!
Social Media might be a huge marketing platform but, email marketing is still a great tool for getting clients excited about your small business.
Consistency and organization are the most important things to keep in mind while creating your monthly newsletters.
Check your emails for spelling and grammar mistakes before sending them out, catch clients’ attention from the subject line, and make sure people know what they’re getting into when they sign-up for your newsletter!