Out of all forms of marketing, retention marketing is often the most overlooked. Many businesses will continue to focus their time, money, and branding on tracking down new customers, sometimes to the detriment and even alienation of their current users. Marketing and sales should always be looking forward to these new clients, but forgetting the ones you currently have, that you’ve already successfully sold to and could sell again or expand your contracts with, is foolish. Thankfully, there are many retention marketing methods available. We’ll be looking at one of the most straightforward of them: the company newsletter.
Do You Have the Resources for a Newsletter?
First, it’s important to do a reality check and make sure you’ve got the resources needs to start and maintain a newsletter. If not, stand back and see what time and effort you need to put in before you’re in a good place to start emailing.
- Email Collection: Email marketing requires emails. Do you have a good list? Do you collect emails from new clients? Do you have a newsletter signup on your website? Make sure you’ve got a large collection of emails to send to before you start your email marketing.
- Email Permissions: Secondly, are your clients expecting emails from you? Many businesses find it easier to apply GDPR compliance to all their email marketing, and even sending out emails to current clients to ask about their interest in new email marketing.
- Photography and Graphic Design: Many platforms (see below) make it easy to set up eye-catching templates, but to get the most mileage, especially around events in your company, you’ll need some expertise in both photography and graphic design.
- Regular News and Content: Does your business have the content to maintain a monthly newsletter? From notable events to promos to content like blogs and video, a steady stream of content makes a newsletter people will be interested in opening.
- Time and Expertise: Looking past any financial costs of creating your newsletter, do you have the time and training (or time for training) to curate and maintain a newsletter, and to respond to any emails or responses this generates?
Picking a Platform for Email Marketing
After you’ve answered the above question and are ready to move forward, it’s time to think about the platform to use. This depends on a couple of factors, including your needs, amount of emails, and your current resources. Mailchimp is a commonly used platform because of its user-friendly UI and zero cost for under a certain number of contacts. If your business is already using Salesforce as a CRM, they have an email platform (Email Studio) that makes it easy to cross-check names and data. Constant Contact is a great in-between, not as expensive as the entire Salesforce package, but with more CRM bells and whistles than Mailchimp.
Learn more in our two blog posts detailing email marketing platforms:
- Match Your Business with Email Marketing Platforms I
- Match Your Business with Email Marketing Platforms II
What Type of Newsletter to Implement?
Lastly – but definitely not least – you need to brainstorm the content template for your email. Beyond the graphics and layout, deciding and sticking to a format on content will be important for email subscribers to know what they are getting. Newsletters come in all shapes and sizes, here are a few ideas to get started with, including mixing and matching:
- Content Feed: Do you regularly produce blogs, social media posts, and videos? A newsletter is a great way of providing all this content in one place for customers. Depending on the platform you choose, you can implement automatic feeds into the emails or set them up manually.
- Putting a Face on the Company: A newsletter is a great place to connect with your clients and customers by sharing events from within your company, from community outreach to employee of the month.
- Events and Promos: You can also use newsletters to advertise any upcoming events or incentivize return customers with promo and coupon offers online or in-store. Customers will find this a convenient way to get your deals, and you’ll have an easy way to advertise.
Retention marketing should be a part of your next marketing plan. It’s always easier to market to current clients than new ones. If you’re looking to get into advanced email marketing, learn about how email automation can improve your sales and marketing pipelines. If you’re struggling to find the resources and expertise to set up a new marketing plan or execute email marketing, it’s time to contact Vision. We’re a full-service marketing agency, able to help you plan out your marketing and implement it across email, websites, social media, and more.
