Why indeed. A good newsletter represents a significant time investment, including research and, what can often be the most difficult factor, coming up with fresh content. There isn’t always a great new thing or an amazing new technique or bit of news to report on. If you’ve set up a regular, recurring, expected letter this can present a challenge.
So why set yourself up for that potential grief?
Because engagement with your customers is critical.
Make A Fan
Building quality engagement has everything to do with your approach to the customer relationship. Customers, even your own customers, tend to delete messages they aren’t expecting, especially when they aren’t from a well known source. The best, most compelling subject lines go ignored.
How can you raise that standard?
The answer, as is true for most successful activities, is with an investment. The view needed to make this happen could be summed up with the statement “Add value first.” Make a fan, make a friend, and you’ll get a supporter and, at the end of the day, someone who will listen when you have something to say.
Give Them More
Try a strategy of:
- Permission
- Content
- Outreach
Gain the permission of your customers by providing valuable content they come to anticipate, making the delivery of other content much more likely to be received and, importantly, acted on. By investing a little of your time and giving them value first, you create the sort of relationship with your customers that enables quality engagement.
How?
There are many ways to go about it, but a regular newsletter, or similar, anticipated communication, is worth its weight in gold. It takes some effort, yes, it takes an additional investment of time, but if you’re finding ways to add value to your customer’s lives – without asking for anything in return – then you’re on your way to the sort of relationship that will pay dividends. They’ll come to view you as a source of help. You’ll become someone they look forward to hearing from. What you do, the content you create, is up to you, but keep this objective in mind and you can’t go wrong.
Add value first. Build the relationship.
Having a growing group of hybrid fan/customers triggers all sorts of word-of-mouth, great reviews and other things you can’t directly affect but which yield powerful, positive results. Over time any lag you might have suffered in smaller, immediate sales, is made up for exponentially by ongoing sales activity from friendly, happy, interested customers.
Reaching Them
Which makes the mechanics of reaching your audience as important as the value of the content. Fortunately there are successful actions here as well. For starters making contact requires good email addresses. Obvious, sure, but maintaining a good list, or even getting a list if you need emails, is the first step. Outreach leads to this. ManageByStats can find real emails for you if you have customer names and addresses. Building your list over time also helps, adding in new customers as you have them, giving them that same regular content and, hopefully, making their lives that much better.
The Long Game
Adding value, helping – adopting this philosophy to stimulate engagement will take you far in building a legion of customers who actually want to hear from you. Do that, and when it’s time to make the sale they’ll be there waiting, even eager, to hear what you have to offer.
To your selling success.
All the best,
The ManageByStats Team
