If you see the value of a newsletter, but your business doesn't have one, her are a few ideas to help get you started! (If you're not seeing the benefits of a newsletter yet, check out this article.) As we've said before, a newsletter can be very good for drumming up business by drawing people back to your website! Although it can take some time to start, once the foundation is laid, is pretty simple to fill in new content each week/month/quarter!
Convinced? Great, let's talk about starting one!
They are a many helpful tool that can increase engagement with your clients and keeping them in touch with what is going on in your business. Your business should already have a blog, and if it does, adding an e-newsletter to the mix will be easy-peasy. By pushing your new blog posts through e-newsletters, you provide another outlet for people to see what you're up to! Plus, if you're already writing posts, you can knock out two things at once.
There are a few different routes you can take in the pursuit of creating an e-newsletter, popular, professional, or personal.
Popular
There are a couple of websites that provide a great service for simplifying the process of creating and sending e-newsletters. This is great for people who really want to create e-newsletters but do not have the tools to do so. These services are worth every penny ... especially those that are free.
With Mail Chimp, you can create your own newsletter based on the templates provided, you can customize them to your specifications, or just start from scratch! The great thing about an e-newsletter is that once you've picked a style, you can hang onto it until it's time for an update. Therefore, while this may be a tedious task at first, once it's created, you can simply plug in the new information each cycle!
There's also Constant Contact, who will customize a template specifically for your company. They also offer lots of support in case you experience any difficulties! I think both of these websites are great resources for easily sending out newsletters each week/month/quarter!
Professional
The professional route is a sure-fire way of getting an e-newsletter that coincides well with your website. A professional has the capability to create a custom e-newsletter that is clearly pointing back to your website. This is the best option for companies that do not have the time nor the desire to create e-newsletters themselves. There are a couple of trains one can take with this as well, both of which require the work of a professional:
The ever-popular PDF is a great option for e-newsletters. Designers are able to create an e-newsletter in any shape, form or fashion one may desire. Typically, the business will need to provide the content for each newsletter to the designer who will then create the PDF and prepares it to be sent out to all of your subscribers. (You'll want to talk to your marketer about this.) Constant Contact and Mail Chimp are both good options just for sending out your newsletter to many subscribers, since it manages all of the groups of contacts for you. However, this mailing service is usually not free.
Integration
Another good option is to have an e-newsletter that is integrated with CMS. This is likely the best option for seamlessly integrating a newsletter with your blog. Once a CMS newsletter is created, it has set parameters to pull content from the specified are of your website, and it automatically creates an e-newsletter for you. Therefore, the added step of creating a newsletter each month is minimized. At this point, your company only has to publish a new blog and the e-newsletter will be created from that! There are even built-in services set up to send the newsletter out. If you want low-maintenance, highly-integrated newsletter in your clients' in-boxes this is the way to go!
Personal
I would be remiss if I did not mention the option of simply creating a new blog post and sharing that post on social media! This is what we do every week(ish) at DanielTitus.com, and it really works well for us. We write a post each week, publish them every Thursday at noon(ish), and then share on social media every Friday morning. We would recommend a similar schedule to anyone whether promoting through social media, email or any other medium!
One note on timing of newsletters: It is best to get in a cycle of sending out newsletters. You also need to let people know how often they will be receiving newsletters, so there aren't any surprises.
So, there you have it! e-Newsletters can be a great tool for your business. Let's make one today!