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

The Three Types of Content You Need to Master

Interested in digital marketing?  

Here are the three types of content you’re going to need:

Low Level

What is it?

• Small “bite-size” chunks of information, curated links, cool images etc.  This is classic social media, it’s personal, intimate, relevant and most of all, frequent.

What’s it for?

• Keeps you in front of your audience, kinda like coca cola brand advertising so that when a purchasing decision is imminent, your business is a consideration.

What do you need to learn?

• How to digest huge amounts of information and to quickly discern and share the good stuff.  You’ll need to get familiar with tools like RSS, Buffer, Dvlr.it, Evernote and once you have that down you’ll need to allocate time to interact with your audience.

Mid Level

What is it?

• This is you - these are your words - presented as a blog post or a video.  It’s where you first start to share what you know.  It’s no longer bite-size - this is a snack or an appetizer, it’s easy to digest but is enough to give people a feel for who you are and what you have to offer.

What’s it for?

• Helps people fall in love with you - develops an emotional attachment between you and the customer so that they not only choose to listen to you, but they give you permission to contact them.

What do you need to learn?

• How to be natural - whether you’re writing a blog post or producing a video you have to be 100% authentic.  How to format text, how to source a licensed image and crop it, how to use meta information correctly.  But most importantly, how to produce authentic high quality posts on a regular basis.

High Level

What is it?

• Typically your newsletter - this is the good stuff, your best work, the information you spend more time producing than anything else.  It is informative and entertaining, the opening rate is the number one KPI that drives your business.

What’s it for?

• It is how you cement the emotional connection with your audience so that when it’s time to buy, they choose you.

What do you need to learn?

• You can’t produce an effective newsletter without mastering both low level and mid level content.  You can’t inform your audience about the market if you aren’t absorbing the latest information and you can’t be consistently entertaining if you aren’t 100% authentic.

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Written while listening to: New Fazioli tracks by music2work2

Image credit: Zen Master by Okko Pyykkö on Flickr