While social networking is a prominent part of most marketing plans, email newsletters still play a role. Your newsletter is still a tool to help you connect with, touch your customers, and create conversations. Here are some ways to make your newsletters more sociable and interactive.
- Make sure that your customers opt-in for your newsletter. If they don’t, your newsletter could be considered spam, and that’s never a good thing. Never sign up anyone without their express permission.
- Ask your customers what’s important to them, and then share those concerns and ideas in your newsletter with your other customers. (Always get their permission before you share these ideas with others.) You can create surveys, polls, and questions to get your customers opinions on any number of questions and ideas. Use your accounts on Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn to ask these questions. Ask them important aspects of your business and industry, and share their opinions in your newsletter to get the conversations rolling.
- Use varied content in your newsletter to keep it fresh and interesting. Kick up the content with video, pictures, case studies, customer profiles, product profiles, solutions, and prizes for customer solutions and results. Provide content that people will read because it offers them valuable information that they can use in their everyday lives.
- Give people information that they want to share with others. It can be funny, thoughtful, interesting, appropriate, realistic, helpful, or even controversial as long as you respect your audience. You can have strong opinions, that keeps the conversation flowing in future newsletters, and on your social media sites, too.
- Use your newsletters to channel traffic to your social networking sites, and use your social networking sites to generate content for your newsletters. Make it easy for your subscribers to share your content with others.
Your newsletters can generate more interest in your products, your services, and your business in general if they are interactive and not just self-serving advertising. A well-rounded marketing plan includes all the various ways you can interact with existing customers and attract new ones.