How to grow your Small Business using an Email Campaign

Businesses use various audio and video digital marketing materials such as seminars, webinars, and podcasts, and have business transcription agencies convert the content into text for greater online visibility. One business marketing strategy that has become increasingly important in recent years is email marketing, with newsletters topping the list in email use. According to Pardot, newsletters accounted for 66% of email use, followed by promotional content (54%), and welcome series emails (42%) in 2015. In fact, email newsletters are now a vital and affordable tool for businesses to connect with and communicate ideas, events, and product/service information to shareholders, customers, employees and other industry stakeholders.

When done right, a simple e-newsletter campaign can grow your business and build your brand. Digital newsletter offers the following benefits:

• Communicate with your target audience: A marketing newsletter reaches your target audience, especially clients who are interested in your product or service. Clients who sign up for your newsletter already have a relationship with your company and will be interested in receiving information about your latest offerings and special offers.
• Build trust: Newsletters build trust with customers and show them that they’re valued. An engaging and useful newsletter reaches out to your customers and promotes your company and brand. Good content is important. In addition to information about your product, you can include related tips, instructions or ideas. A digital transcription service provider can also help by repurposing your valuable video and audio content into text for your newsletter. Providing useful information is essential to build a long-term relationship with your customers.
• Create awareness: A digital newsletter provides the opportunity to increase awareness and understanding of your company and its products and services. Customers and prospects get a broad perspective of what your company offers. You can include links in the newsletter to encourage your audience to learn more about your company and its products/services.
• Demonstrate expertise: Effective newsletters are informational and not focused on drive sales. By using your newsletter to demonstrate your expertise and authority on niche products and services, you can build your brand. This will distinguish your business from competition and give readers a reason to trust you.
• Showcase new products: Digital newsletters are an ideal way to showcase products and services or launch new products. They can be used to run special offers exclusive to readers, which will boost the effect of your advertising and promotional campaigns. A newsletter drives customers to contact your company and simplifies your sales efforts.
• Educate consumers: People are attracted to content that provides educational value. In fact, educating readers via newsletters is a very useful strategy for insurance companies. Many people don’t understand insurance and basic health terms. For instance, smartspublishing.com reports that only 14% of people understand the four basic health insurance terms: “deductible,” “copay,” “coinsurance” and “maximum out of pocket.” Insurance newsletters can educate readers about these basic terms.

While a newsletter is an effective business communication tool, in order to succeed, you need to ensure that it contains certain elements.

• Good content: The type of content to include in your newsletter will depend on who your audience is. For instance, business newsletters are an excellent way to inform your customers about industry trends. Other content ideas include company news, feature stories, new product/service announcements, blogs and educational articles. Including fresh content and the latest news is important to capture interest. A reliable online transcription company can transform any relevant audio or video content into text format for inclusion in your newsletter.
• Brevity: When it comes to a marketing newsletter, brevity is important. Concise informative content and images can convey much more than wordy text. An email newsletter has limited space to get a message across and a carefully chosen image can make a big statement. Experts recommend balancing newsletter content to be 90% educational and 10% promotional.
• Enticing headlines: Don’t keep repeating the email subject line in every newsletter you send out. Keep readers interested by creating a unique creative, engaging subject line that accurately represents the newsletter’s contents.
• Have a primary call-to-action (CTA): A newsletter should have a strong CTA. It should grab your subscribers’ attention and encourage them to take action. For instance, an e-commerce business can encourage readers to visit their store.
• Attractive design: Newsletters can be created in various formats such as plain text emails, HTML emails, PDFs, etc. HTML newsletter design is a great option as it is visually appealing though restricted in size. Ensure an uncluttered design format. Each design type has its advantages and limitations and you can experiment with them to decide which will work best for your business.
• Optimize for mobile: To remain relevant in the mobile revolution, it’s important to optimize your email newsletter for mobile. Using responsive email design for the templates will allow the content to be viewed across multiple screens and devices.
• Publish at regular intervals: Newsletters should be sent out in a timely fashion. For instance, they can be published, once a week, twice a month, monthly, quarterly, or annually depending on your objectives. What’s important is ensuring that your subscribers get all the updates, news, and information in a consistent manner.

Finally, to make your email newsletter work for your business, you would need to monitor metrics and test and optimize elements such as subject lines, headers, CTA, design, and layout. A properly executed email newsletter campaign can drive targeted visitors to your website, build your brand, and ultimately increase sales and revenue.