One of the best weapons you have in your on-line marketing arsenal is the newsletter. Writing a newsletter addresses two different, but essential, business strategies. As part of your marketing strategy, it lets you connect with your customers on a consistent basis to build a solid relationship with them. It also informs prospective clients of your expertise by teaching them about your products or services.
As part of a web site content strategy, your newsletter should also be posted on your web site. This consistently adds substantial written content to your website, prompting search engines to frequently index your site. The more links you receive in the search engines, the greater the chance that people will see you as an authority in your field.
Automation
There are several ways that you can set up how you will collect subscribers and send out your newsletter. The first is to subscribe to a dedicated newsletter service such as GetResponse. They are template based systems. You choose your format you want your newsletter to look like and then type or paste your articles into the template.
They provide two ways for your readers to sign up for your newsletter. The first is a web signup form that you can add to your website. They provide the code and all you do is paste it into a page of your web site. The other method is through the use of an email address. Your reader sends a blank email from the address they want to receive the newsletter at, and the system automatically adds it to your list.
Most businesses prefer to use the web form signup method, because it allows you to request additional demographic information, such as name, location, zip code, etc. This helps you to automatically personalize your newsletters and to see who is signing up for them. By segmenting your list, you can also test market different styles or offers to see what works best.
If you are using a Content Management System (CMS) to build your website, and you should be, then there are software specific modules you can add to also automate this whole process. This is the best option if you are comfortable working with computers and/or you want to create a custom template to match the design of your website. It also eliminates the extra cost of a separate service.
Regardless of which system you use to signup subscribers and send out your newsletter, you should always set up your system for double opt-in. This means that when someone signs up for your newsletter, they automatically get sent an email asking for them to confirm that they requested the subscription. They have to click on a link in the email to activate the subscription. This does two things for you. First, it is an extra layer of protection in case someone accuses you of spam. Second, it prevents an unscrupulous competitor from flooding your site with false signups in an effort to get you closed down or give you a bad reputation.