Ask yourself these questions as you plan your email newsletter.
What is your goal? How does it align with your business’ goals?
- Increase sales?
- Drive traffic to your website or blog?
- Act as a lead to bring in more customers?
Based on that goal, what kind of content do you want to include, and where will it come from?
- An internal blog or content area of your website
- External links to sources you think would be helpful to your customers
- Marketing elements such as ads for weekly specials or coupons for free or reduced price services
- An opportunity to join a loyalty program
- Social media links
- Forward to a friend
Who is your target audience?
If you have any information on who visits your website, that’s a good start. What age and gender is your primary customer? When creating an email, you should picture that customer and how, where and why they would read your email.
Is yours an audience that makes sense for an email newsletter?
Depending on the answer, it may be that creating a newsletter just doesn’t make sense for your particular organization or business.
Check out the competition.
What are other businesses like yours doing? Make a list of your competitors locally, and also look at others in your industry or profession that you think have great marketing and outreach. What are they doing? Is anyone doing it really well? If so, study what they do and why you like it. If no one else is hitting it out of the park, that may mean there’s a prime opportunity for you to do so.
