Leveraging your email list into sales will give your company a huge competitive edge. Email represents an exciting opportunity to drive sales because of the intimate relationship you can build with people. When someone gives you their email address, it means you’ve connected with them and proven to them you can be a useful resource.
But this chance won’t last forever. Pestering people and filling their inbox with promotional content will lead them to filter you into the spam folder or unsubscribe from your messages. It’s important you find a way to connect with people so that they continue to value the information you provide. But since your newsletter is also a marketing tactic, you need to make sure your efforts are also supporting the business by driving sales.
Here are some tips for helping you craft a digital newsletter that really drives sales.
Understand what a newsletter is for
To be able to create an effective newsletter, you need to first be clear what purpose it serves. And the first thing to remember is that the primary focus of your newsletter is actually not to drive sales. At least not directly.
The point of your newsletter is to build engagement and brand affinity. People who sign up for your newsletter already know about you. They know some of the products you offer and why you’re relevant. In the newsletter, your job is to start giving them reasons why they should come back to you.
Part of the way that you do this is through information and education. When people begin to consider you as a resource, it means they are thinking about you in moments other than when they are looking to make a purchase. This allows you to connect with them at a different point in their journey, increasing the chances they’ll come to you later on when they’re ready to make a purchase.
Another thing a newsletter can do is enhance the emotional connection between you and your customers. Producing stories that make people feel something is incredibly valuable, especially since emotions play such a large role in the decisions making process.
These stories could be related to some of the social work your company does, or they can be something that riles people up. This will depend on the audience you’re trying to reach and the goals you have for your brand.
But no matter which approach you choose, if you can tap into people’s emotions with your newsletter, then you have a much better chance of holding their attention and encouraging them to make a purchase.
In essence, the purpose of your newsletter is to expand customer lifetime value (CLV). It’s good that you were able to make one sale, but to really grow and expand, you need to maximize the amount that each person spends with you.
Your newsletter can do this when you use it to build CLV. If you try to use it as a direct sales tool, then people will quickly turn away and you’ll miss out on a great opportunity to connect and engage with your audience.
Produce content that addresses people’s problem
However, there does need to be some sales goal attached to your newsletter. It’s all well and good to provide people with information and resources that helps them solve their problems, but you do need to look out for yourself. The way to do this is to produce informational content that directs people towards some of the solutions that you offer.
The first step in doing this is to understand the problems your customer is facing. A Customer Journey Map is a great way to do this. In this exercise, you create a fictitious ideal customer and detail his or her life from the moment they wake up to when they go to sleep.
After you do this, take some time to figure out how you fit into the picture. What do you offer to people that will help them solve the problems they encounter?
Once you’ve determined this, it’s time to create content. It’s important not to make it too salesy or promotional. Instead, focus on the problem and the solution you are offering. If you can do this successfully, then some well-placed Calls to Action will help move people towards a purchase.
You want people to read your content and say, “Wow that could be a big help. Where do I get it? Oh! Right here.” As you can see, their first reaction is about the content itself. They’ve either found a nice solution to their problem, or they’ve identified an issue that they didn’t know they had. Either way, you’ve managed to snag someone who’s just beginning their journey and push them to the end, the purchase.
This will take some time to get right, and you might not be able to produce every piece of content like this. But if you can include at least one article in each newsletter that addresses a customer problem and directs them towards your solution, then you should be able to turn your newsletter into something capable of really driving sales.
Test, test, and retest
They say the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting the same results. In content marketing, this could not be more true. If your content is not producing the kind of results you want, then it’s time to try something new.
In attempting to turn your newsletter into an engine of sales, it’s important you be flexible and try out some new stuff. Running A/B tests is great for this. Decide on your conversion pieces, and then create a few different versions. Send each one out to a different group, and then track their progress to see which one performs best.
This is valuable for a couple of reasons. First, it makes it easy to identify exactly which pieces of content are producing the best results. And second, it helps you learn more about your target audience. Specifically, you can learn a lot about what it is your audience is looking for in your newsletter.
Pieces that perform poorly will give you an indication as to what people do not want from you, whereas those that produce results demonstrate what you should be doing more of.
And it’s important that you don’t ever get comfortable. You can always be doing better, so even when things start to improve, know that you can always get more out of your content. Keep running these tests so that you can gain a deeper understanding of your audience and produce content that will give your bottom line a real boost.
Turn your newsletter into a sales machine
Don’t miss out on an awesome opportunity to bring in new sales. By giving you their email addresses, your customers have put their faith in you - and remember, your email marketing should adhere to privacy regulations and the new GDPR rules. You can leverage this trust into better sales by producing content that builds engagement and brand affinity, and that also establishes you as an authority and a resource.
Take a look at your newsletter to identify where you could be doing better so that you can use this precious customer contact to drive sales and company growth.
