With all the talk of SEO, SMO, SEM and the like, it can be easy to lose focus on methods of marketing that have worked for generations.

Newsletters are a great way of letting existing clients know you are still innovating and introducing new services. It is all too easy to get into a cycle of “business as usual” with your loyal clients and newsletters offer the chance to generate some interest in what you can offer now as opposed to when the contract was signed all those years ago.

If you have the pleasure of working in sales, you will know that those leads that once seem hot can quickly cool off and eventually fall off the radar entirely. A regular newsletter arriving in your contact’s inbox will remind them of your existence (even if only for a minute in the whole month!).

A catchy title will encourage recipients to actually open the newsletter. Gossip website Popbitch is very good at this. Recent Popbitch newsletters have been titled:

“obamallama!”
“Look at the size of my fish”
“Mama Lolo’s Gender Bar and Butchery”

and so on. Seemingly random titles like these make a popbitch newsletter stand out when it arrives in your inbox alongside dozens of emails titled “great savings on…”, “Amazing deals on…” and the like. Of course, Popbitch-esque titles are not right for everyone.

How often do you receive a newsletter from a website and it goes straight in the bin?

Probably quite often, if you are anything like me. This is because there is often no incentive to read the content.

One way to ensure your newsletters get opened is to include regular special offers. There is an old saying in advertising that the most powerful words in the English language are “free” and “new”. If you are in a position to run competitions or give away freebies, this is a great way of opening a dialogue with your readers, whether they are existing customers, pondering prospects or just those interested in who you are and what your about (that’d be your rivals then). A genuine special offer in the newsletter’s title encourages more people to read the content. Regular offers encourage regular readers!

Also, be sure that your newsletters contain stories and offers that the readership will be interested in. There is nothing more annoying than receiving daily mailshots with no substance from some website you once bought something from after an evening at the pub.  Grrrrrrr!

We often find that the most clicked links in newsletters are those that are off theme. From a writer’s  point of view this is great news as it shows that people are paying attention. Using a site like Pure for deliveries makes it easy to see what people are responding to in your newsletter.

As with all marketing, good newsletters reflect well on your business, bad newsletters don’t.

If you want to recieve our own newsletter, click here and fill in your email address. We won’t do anything naughty with your details and won’t pass them to anyone else. You’ll be the first to know of any special offers and new Upstream services. Better be quick though as our next newsletter will be out this week!