Newsletter Marketing 101: Why Your Customers are Ignoring You

Do your email newsletters never get opened? Do your fans often ignore you on your social media outlets? Many small business have trouble figuring out how to engage their customers and potential customers. How you communicate with them is important, and newsletter marketing is a big part of that.

Whether you send a monthly or bi-weekly email newsletter, the likelihood of a user clicking the link to “unsubscribe” from your newsletter is 67%, according to an ExactTarget study. Here are some helpful tips of direct marketing via newsletters and how to leverage your newsletters through social media.

• When should you send out your newsletters? According to Mashable, don’t send your newsletters on Monday — customers usually get a blast of emails at the beginning of the week and will ignore your emails. Don’t send on Friday afternoons because it’s closing time and the last thing a customer is thinking at 5 pm is your email.
• What is the main focus of your email? Will your newsletter include promotions or will it be informative? You want to set these guidelines so that your customers know what to expect. In your newsletter, you can discuss a new product and/or service you are carrying or even how you resolved a concern with a customer. Deals and freebies for subscribers can also be effective.
• Do you have an opt-in or unsubscribe option? The top three reasons users “unsubscribe” from email newsletters are overfrequency of your emails, repetitious or boring content, and the number of emails a user gets from several companies.
• Is the newsletter content boring? The first way to engage a “subscriber” is having an enticing subject line. If the subject is drab, the user will not even open your email. Keep the content concise. If your newsletter can’t be scanned in five minutes, you might as well not send it out.

• How do I market my newsletter? Now that you have sent out your newsletter, you can also reach people who do not subscribe already. You can post a link to your newsletter on Facebook and Twitter. You may have fans who aren’t aware of or do not subscribe to your newsletter but still like you, and marketing to them is a good way to boost subscribers.
• How do you measure the success of your newsletters? Some services, such as Mailchimp, provide metrics for your efforts. It’s important to gauge if a subscriber opens your email or what draws them in. Without metrics, it’s hard to visualize what you are doing wrong or right.

These helpful tips will get your business on track for performing effective newsletter marketing. How do you interact and engage with your customers?