Tips to get started with your newsletter | Ep. #12

Hi, my name is Phillip Stemann, and I’ll be learning you how to succeed with your website.

Using a newsletter is a great way for you to keep your readers updated or your buyers to say. You can via a newsletter, generate sales and this is a perfect way for you to have a cheap channel to reach your buyers or your visitors. As I see it, everyone can have a newsletter based on your industry. It doesn’t matter because if you have an industry where you don’t feel people are so techy, that doesn’t matter. You can still give them news about what’s happening in the industry, what’s going to happen in the future within the industry or within your company.

You can write about your company if there are any news. Are you scaling? Are you hiring? Are you doing any new cool things that can benefit the reader? The newsletter is a perfect idea for this. Furthermore, it’s a great tool to promote your blog posts. So if you’re writing a blog post, make sure to set up a newsletter that’s going to promote this blog post to all your readers and your subscribers. If you have a webshop, you can send out discount codes and based on these discount code, you can actually measure how well your newsletters are performing?

Because if a lot of your readers are using this specific discount code, well, then, you know. You can also share if you have new product collections for your webshop. This is also a great way to create awareness about your webshop.

When you need to get started on your newsletter, then you need to write this newsletter extremely simple. You have probably often seen these very fancy newsletters with a fancy design, but forget about that. That does not convert.

Of course, if you are talking about a new product collection and you want to show some examples from this product collection, then you need to make some design. But based on a lot of analysis, then the simpler you make your newsletter, the better. The simpler lines the subscriber needs to read, the bigger the chance is for them to actually clicking on your CTA. The reason why is because it feels more personalised. It’s like reading an email from a colleague.

So it’s extremely important that you keep it very, very to the point and very simple. Just text, white background and maybe do maximum five sentences and then you’re good to go. Furthermore, remember to plan ahead when you’re writing your newsletter, make it a part of your marketing plan. If you’re doing a specific campaign, well, then the newsletter is a great way to create awareness about this campaign. But before you can start writing all these newsletters, you need subscribers.

The way you get subscribers is through a newsletter form this newsletter, form you can place everywhere on your website. You can place it in the footer between blog posts, even between your pages. And it’s important you do this and remember to track where people sign up the most. If people sign up in the footer, then create more awareness about this footer and maybe make it a little bit more treated if they sign up through a blog post, well, then focus on that area it’s extremely important.

That you analyse this area, your newsletter form should also contain how often you send out and what does your newsletter contain. If you have a form that’s just says newsletter, sign up, then people don’t know what they’re signing up for. They need to know what am I getting out of this newsletter? And when you’re done with your newsletter form, it’s important you find the right platform for you. A newsletter platform is a great way for you to automate a lot of your resources and a lot of your manual processes, because who likes manual processes today?

So it’s important when you choose a newsletter platform that first of all, it can integrate your current form with this platform. Choose one where you can see in the future it won’t cost you a fortune. Because one thing that all these newsletter platforms does is that they give you a free version of their platform, but then it’s often up to maybe one thousand emails and after that it becomes extremely expensive. The reason why they do that is because when you have used it up to one thousand emails, you are very, very integrated in the system.

And changing a system is not something you just do in a day that takes a lot of time. So remember to check out, first of all, the prices of this newsletter platform. Is it okay in the future when you start growing? And then one last thing, make sure it integrates with your website, because if you choose and use the platform that has no integration to your website, you will run into manual processes in the future.

Last but not least, when you start sending out newsletters, you need to stick to your promise. If you have said on your newsletter form I am sending out once every week, then you need to stick to it, even though you have maybe only five to ten subscribers you need to keep sending out, because if you are creating value for your readers, they’ll tell about this newsletter to other people, and mouth by mouth, your newsletter will grow, but if you all of a sudden stop and send once in a while, then people don’t know what this newsletter is in the end and they will end up unsubscribing.

So that’s it for today. Thank you for listening. Remember to leave a review and remember, consistency is key to success. Let’s catch up on the next one.