Written by Eric Gockel
With this age of Facebook, blogging, Twitter and more, do people still send out newsletters? Yes! Its great to monitor the conversation of your product or service outside of your company walls in the social networks, but you should still keep a strong, curated message coming from home base.
We discussed in our last post whether an email address is worth more than a Twitter follower. Our experience has shown that Facebooking and Tweeting can certainly help with SEO but for some customers, a regular email tying back to content on their website, can certainly give them a needed boost.
The spikes in the graph above are on the days when our client sends out their weekly email, usually containing an excerpt from their latest blog posts, tempting folks to click thru with the help of a juicy cliffhanger link. Usually a couple other topics are added to the email newsletter like upcoming events or special offers, to capture the reader’s attention, if the primary content isn’t interesting enough for them.
Before we began helping with this client’s email newsletters, they were putting unique content into the newsletters that couldn’t be found elsewhere. That’s a great tactic to get people to sign up for your newsletters, but not to get people to re-visit your website.
Now, by moving their interesting content to their website’s blog, the newsletter can be a beacon, bringing people back to the website. Sure, we’ll post links to the blog posts and events on Twitter and Facebook too, but don’t forget email as a trusty channel in your marketing plans.
Bonus tip: Add an autoresponder for your newsletter signups. Check your website stats and put links to your top 5 (or 3) pieces of content to give your new subscribers a taste of what’s to come.
Not sure what to write? Ask your subscribers what problems they’re having or what they’d like to read.