Marketing Newsletters: Sell More to Existing Customers
Marketing newsletters can be an excellent resource if you want to keep selling to existing customers or clients. Here’s how…
Because these people have already bought from you, you have an established relationship, which generally suggests you take an information-driven approach. In this approach, your marketing newsletter serves to keep customers informed about new developments or opportunities.
For example, one of my newsletter clients, a software company, used its marketing newsletter to provide quarterly updates. Each issue of the newsletter included stories about new features that had been added; other articles explained how to take advantage of lesser-known or lesser-used features. And yet other articles explained how other customers had used the software to achieve some gain.
Another of my marketing newsletter clients, an insurance company, doesn’t worry about direct selling of any kind in the newsletter it sends to its brokers. Instead, I write abstracts of articles from business magazines, articles with useful information for the company’s brokers. In this case, the marketing newsletter simply reminds the target audience that the company is there to serve them.
I also published a marketing newsletter of my own. Abbott’s Communication Letter, for more than six years. It provided useful articles about business communication, and carried advertising for my own products or the products/services of other companies. The advertising in the newsletter generated revenue, while the newsletter itself helped me brand myself as an expert in business marketing.
Three very different approaches to marketing newsletters, and three effective approaches. And all of them lasted. The shortest lifespan among them was six years, and the longest (which I’m still writing and publishing) is now approaching its 20th anniversary. Their survival is no minor issue — most newsletters stop publishing after just a few issues.
The key to each of these marketing newsletters has been to provide useful information to readers. A marketing newsletter that provides useful information will get read, and a newsletter that gets read will usually be effective: it will get the response you want.
