How Well Do You Know Your Newsletter?

If you produce a regular newsletter, here’s a quick test to see if you have a good handle on it.

Quickly write out the answers to these questions:

• What kind of people are on your list?
• What do they have in common?
• What are they motivated by?
• What do you have that they want to learn about?
• What does your newsletter do?
• How does it make you money?

Here’s the answers for this newsletter

• Business owners and marketers
• They manage the marketing for their business
• Increasing visibility, ultimately growing sales
• Knowledge about digital marketing
• Consistently provides ideas about digital marketing
• When people on the list want to implement those ideas, I’m the guy they go to for help

What are the answers for your newsletter?

If you can’t quickly produce answers for your newsletter, it’s an indication that you don’t have a clear enough understanding of what you are doing and why.

That lack of clarity will have a detrimental impact on the efficacy of your marketing efforts.

I’m doing a lot of work with newsletters at the moment, if you’d like to talk about yours, get in touch.

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Written while listening to: Sexercise by music2work2

Image credit: Value by GotCredit on Flickr

You And Your Newsletter

Coca Cola spends over 3 billion dollars a year on marketing.

While some of that is allocated to content creation, the vast majority is spent on ensuring people see what they come up with.

While they get to play with TV, billboards and sponsorships, what do we have?  Short lived social content with the lifespan of a fruit fly, blog posts that may not get seen, expensive Google ads or targeted Facebook ads that can do more harm than good.

Newsletters beat advertising

If there’s one thing I know to be true from working with business owners who have adopted a content strategy, it is that their email newsletter is the number one source of revenue.

Email trumps everything because it arrives in the customer’s inbox.  If you can consistently produce a good newsletter you’ll create more value around your brand than any of Coke’s multi-billion dollar campaigns.

Are you doing enough?

If you don’t have a newsletter, you should change that. 

If you do, take a moment to look at how you are promoting it.  I would suggest, for most businesses running a content strategy, your newsletter signup should take precedence over any other call to action on your website.

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Written while listening to: New Fazioli tracks by music2work2

Image credit: Pepsi-Coca-Cola Reversion by Graham Smith on Flickr