Marketing Newsletters: Selling to New Customers
If you’re using your marketing newsletter to sell to new customers, prospects, then your strategy will be different than if you are selling to existing customers. Here’s why…
A marketing newsletter targeting new customers has a couple of hurdles to overcome, hurdles not faced by a marketing newsletter that targets existing customers.
First, there are questions of credibility and trust: Will you deliver what you promised, when you promised? How good is your guarantee or warranty? Will you protect my privacy? Take care of my credit card information? You can answer these questions directly in your marketing newsletter, but there’s more in play here.
For a couple of my clients, which publish business-to-business marketing newsletters, the secret has been continuity. When they started publishing their newsletters, they were small players in their markets. But by consistently publishing, on time, over several years, they’ve developed a stature among members of their target market.
One client is an insurance company. For almost 20 years now, we’ve delivered a marketing newsletter every two months, year in and year out. The company has been very well managed, and the consistency of the newsletter has underlined that competence. The marketing newsletter gives an indirect voice to the company’s growing stature.
Another client sells software to the oil and gas industry. Its marketing newsletter, 12 or more pages in full color, sent a message to prospects that this company is serious. The marketing newsletter was a key ingredient in its rapid and successful growth from a tiny university spinoff into a public company. Again, the newsletter was delivered consistently, both in terms of timing and the high quality of the publication.
So, what I’m stressing here is the need to publish your marketing newsletter regularly and consistently over time, and in time means years, not months. A marketing newsletter that makes an appearance, then disappears after a few months sends the wrong message - a very wrong message.
Be sure you’ve thought out a plan for your marketing newsletter before you start. It’s the only way to create one that delivers the credibility that turns prospects into customers and clients.
