One way to stay in touch with your customers (and prospects) is by sending them a regular newsletter. If it’s good, they’ll look forward to it every month (or week!). This is an easy and inexpensive way to stay ‘top of mind’ with your subscribers.
Here are some ideas for content to publish:
- Informative, educational “How to…” articles
- Reviews of new products
- Comparisons between similar products
- Interviews with industry experts
- Case studies (preferably involving your own customers)
- Q&A – ask for, and then answer, customer questions
- “Best of the Web” – publish links to great sites, resources, videos and articles
With an email marketing service, you can ‘preload’ your newsletters months in advance, as long as you publish ‘evergreen’ content. You can send out a broadcast email when you want to announce something – a sale, a new arrival, a subscribers-only special.
The easiest way to create a monthly newsletter is by creating a monthly summary of the articles you’re already publishing on your website, with links to the articles. This encourages your email subscribers to click through to your website, which increases the activity on your site. The search engines like to see traffic, so this will also indirectly help your search rankings.
If you’re using WordPress, there are a couple of plugins which will even create a monthly newsletter for you. Have a look at MailPoet (free for up to 2,000 subscribers) and Mailster ($55 on CodeCanyon).
Im a big fan of sending out a regular Ezine to my members. But i do believe that it depends on the type of list that you have.
I have a list just for Blogging were i inform them about new posts and this one is often a very simple email.
However my main ezine list involves giving them relevant up to date information on a range of subjects just like whgat you have listed.
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