No matter what your profession, if you're self-employed online, a newsletter is critical to job security.
You need to build a house list of loyal customers, fans, and people who want to hear what you have to say. There are no better financial prospects for you to do business with than the people who've already expressed an interest in you.
There is no cheaper, more efficient way to keep in touch with these folks than with an email newsletter that they sign up to receive.
Consider this: A direct mail campaign via snail mail, has about a 1% open rate. Now these aren't even targeted people, so you can imagine how poor the conversion rate to a purchase is!
An email newsletter to your house list has these big advantages:
- Your sending to a very targeted audience.
- Open success rates are typically between 10-25%
- The recipients of your newsletter can forward it easily to friends.
- Your audience will save the content for future reference if they think it has value.
- You have the ability to send a followup and piggyback on previous content, inexpensively and with ease.
- With a good content manager such as the one I use, you can track the success of your newsletters to see what is working, when the best time to send is, what links you've included people are actually visiting.
- You can include photos.
- You can ask for a direct response or call to action from you audience.
- Email newsletters are very inexpensive to send!
Rules for a good news letter:
- Don't bombard your readers with too much content. When I sign up for a list and get more than 3 emails a week from the same newsletter sender, I unsubscribe. I send out mine about 3 times a month, and I don't recommend more than once a week unless there is an emergency.
- Make sure there is good value in the content. Give tips, news and items of interest to your readers and you'll find yourself getting more and more opens.
- Place relevant links to websites you want people to visit, but be careful not to ONLY try to sell. People know your trying to sell something when you send a newsletter, adding quality informative content doesn't guarantee they'll but they'll stay on the list.
- Get an easy newsletter sign-up box on your website. People who want to hear what you have to say are the best prospects.
- Don't buy a mailing list! Names purchased for an email list will drop off like flies, and the ones that stay on the list are not likely to participate. Why should they? They didn't ask to be on the list, you invaded their privacy by buying their email address.
- Always state that you don't spam or sell email addresses, then make sure to NEVER spam or sell email addresses. Let's look at what Spam really is. Spamming doens't mean selling, many sales pitches are for very useful products and services in high demand. That's not Spam. Spam is when you send information to a party that did not ask for it and likely has no interest in it. My rule: if I didn't ask for the content, it's spam!
- Ask for input on your newsletter once in a while. Put a survey or poll in asking how you can make it better.
- Ask people to forward it.
- Check your links and your spelling.
If your a business owner of any kind,you and only you are responsible for job security. Should't you use the most effective tools available to keep you employed?
Thanks for reading,
AW
Click here to see check out the email list manager I've been using for 6 months and am very happy with.
To see what a newsletter should include click here to see my latest one.
I hope you'll consider signing up for my newsletter in the box below.
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