What is Newsletter Marketing and Why it’s Important for E-commerce

Newsletter marketing… I ain’t got time for that! But what if it was super important for your E-Commerce store and a LOT easier to manage than you think?

 

Email marketing is a powerful online marketing tactic that is often times overlooked or miss-used.

Many people think ‘newsletter’ marketing and cringe at the idea. Mostly because the thought of creating continued content to publish and disseminate is kinda overwhelming.

But newsletter marketing is ‘Hugely’ important for any E-commerce business for two reasons:

1. To Engage Customers and Bring Them Back

2. To help build your organic rankings

 

Customers with a strong attachment to a particular company spend 23% more than average consumers, and the newsletter is a prime candidate to distinguish a brand from the competition. ~ HubSpot

One proposed methodology for newsletters is 90/10: 90% information, 10% sales material. With the right balance, less is more and the educational material will lead to more sales than product copy. ~BigCommerce

 

I’m going to show you how to kill two birds with one stone by using your blog content for successful newsletter marketing to achieve just that.

 

What is Newsletter Marketing?

Newsletter marketing is one component of email marketing, a practice in which companies use email letters to send informational and product-focused content to their audience. Their audience is gathered through subscribers to their site or blog, and companies use that lists to reach their potential or existing customers.

Email marketing is a huge eCommerce benefit because it’s inexpensive and proven to increase ROI.

 

Email marketing is primarily focused on presenting customers with new products, discounts, or to provide some incentive to motivate a sale.

 

Email newsletters, on the other hand, are regularly occurring emails that include primarily informational content or a roundup of your content pulled into one email that users can scroll through and read pieces they choose.

On the surface this may not seem as sexy as sending out some glammed up product promotional emails, but in truth, newsletter marketing is what keeps your customers engaged with your brand.

 

Powerful Content and Follow Up

When it comes to newsletter marketing, you can’t just send out a dull wordy email and expect results. Well, good results anyway.

This is your chance to create powerful content keep your customers’ attention focused on your brand. Your starting point for powerful content is your blog.

Online content is the driving factor for every brand and your blog is the primary source for this relevant, top-notch content.

Creating this powerful content will undoubtedly be your biggest hurdle. In fact, I can’t tell you how many times I’ve heard a client say,

“I’m going to write up a newsletter to send out”, that never actually gets done.

 

I’m going to make this easy for you — you’ve got two choices:

a) You create the content yourself. If you want to do it yourself, follow these steps;

• Know your customer to uncover topics

• Know how to promote without being salesy

• Know how to optimize your blog content

 

b) You recruit someone to do it for you. For less than $250 per month you can;

• hire a professional SEO copywriting service

• invite writers to guest post on your site (free)

• Hit up your local college or university for intern writers (typically free)

 

It all starts with your blog content, but when that’s done, you can pretty quickly work out the rest by using that very same content in the body of your Newsletter email.

There’s a lot of cool image resources like Sleek Lens has for Photoshop and Lightroom, but again effective writing is the key.

After you have created powerful content, perfected that subject line, and created a landing page with the goal to build your brand — you have to remember that newsletter marketing is not a one-time thing. The success of Newsletter marketing hinges on frequent publishing of great content followed by emails to remind your audience that you have information they want.

However, make sure not to overdo it because then your customers might consider you as spam and they will only delete the emails.

 

Why is Newsletter Marketing So Important for Your Ecommerce Business?

Newsletter marketing has a lot of the same strategies and benefits of traditional email marketing — it’s just not as focused on the sale.

1. Reactivation of Inactive Customers

Big or small, every business and brand has customers who become inactive.

No matter what the reason is, it happens… maybe they have forgotten about you or maybe they are gone forever. In order to get the most out of your customer list, you need to establish which situation you’re dealing with. You can, for example, send a reactivation email to your customers who haven’t opened your emails for the last couple of times. This can also be done with customers who haven’t purchased your products for the past couple of months.

 

Reactivation emails are a great means of determining if the customer will return to your brand, or not. The best reactivation emails are those that provide insightful and useful information specific to your audience. The goal should be to give them something they need in addition you get them back as an active participant in your brand. Additionally, reactivation emails will give you an insight in which people you can remove from the list, and this gives you a chance to focus on people who are more likely to buy something from you. The key is to gain their trust back first!

 

 

2. Increased Conversion with Segmentation

If you’re doing your newsletter marketing campaign right, you can easily convert people and it is best done by focusing on segmentation. Take your list of your customers and create segments based on the information you have on them. This way, you can, for example, send a personalized email to a specific geographic region or personalize the emails based on their buying behavior. If you’re using segmentation, the emails will appear to be written for a specific recipient, which customers will appreciate; even though there are hundreds of people that received the same email.

 

Additionally, segmentation will help you boost engagement with these types of emails:

• Retention emails
• Mails for improving customer satisfaction
• Abandoned shopping cart emails
• Birthday emails

 

3. Reward Your Loyal Customers

Another great benefit of newsletter marketing is that you can create a reward program for your customers.

This is important because this way you can keep your customers coming back for more. You can set up a certain milestone for your customers to reach and when they reach it, they get the reward. The milestones can be anything you like, such as a certain number of products to purchase or a certain amount of money to be spent. However, remember not to limit your reward to discounts only, because they don’t have a long-term impact.

 

Brand Image and Reputation

Building a strong brand image and reputation is another real benefit of newsletter marketing.

While product reviews are great for Ecommerce stores, newsletter marketing is focused on building brand trust. This will give you a great insight into what you can improve in your business, it will help boost your brand image and you will be able to serve your customers better. Communication and Feedback is essential, and if it’s given from real people, you will know exactly how to improve any aspect of your e-commerce business; whether it’s about your customer support, product quality, website design, and many other things.

 

 

Even though many online businesses are focusing on reaching their target audience through social media, they are forgetting all about how to multi-task with content that originates from their blog. Many people still use their emails on a daily basis and spend a lot of time in their inbox and this is something you can make use of. So, start preparing a strong plan for newsletter marketing, develop a powerful strategy, create engaging content and keep your audience engages.

This is a proven strategy to improve customer engagement, generate content that ranks and even build backlinks along the way.

 

Newsletter marketing — the ultimate in re-use and re-purpose.