Want to promote yourself and your business, increase traffic to your website, create a sense of personal connection with your customers -- and perhaps even attract new customers? Publishing an email newsletter is one of the least expensive -- and most effective -- ways to do so.
Four years ago, I began producing a monthly email newsletter for my freelance writing business and literacy foundation. It only takes me a few hours every month to create it and send it out, and it is one of the best promotion tools I possess. Thanks to my newsletter, I have gotten requests for speaking gigs, received invitations to serve on panels at writing conferences, landed assignments for articles, made new connections, and strengthened many existing connections in my industry. Furthermore, sending out a newsletter has increased the professional quality of my business and branded me as an "expert" in my field.
However, when I first began sending out newsletters, I made some cringe-worthy mistakes that instantly marked me as a novice rather than an experienced professional. Every new venture includes a learning curve, but you can drastically shorten yours by avoiding these five email marketing mistakes:
1. Spamming and privacy concerns
Never, ever spam your newsletter to people who have not subscribed. There is no quicker way to make yourself look unprofessional and obnoxious.
Similarly, be careful not to broadcast the email addresses of your subscribers to your entire subscription list. If you are sending out your newsletter using your own email service (rather than an HTML service), make sure to put your subscribers' addresses in the "BCC" field so their information will be kept confidential.
It is acceptable to send your contact list an email announcing you will be publishing a new e-newsletter and asking if they would like to subscribe. Make sure your website has a place for visitors to enter their email addresses to your subscription list. Most importantly, when it is time to send out your newsletter, only send it to those people who have indeed subscribed.
2. The info dump
You want to convey useful information, of course, but beware of overloading your newsletter with too much information. If someone opens your newsletter and is greeted with overwhelming blocks of text, he will likely close it out without even reading.
If you have a lot of ideas and information to convey, break an article up into multiple parts and feature just one part per newsletter. An added bonus is that this gets people excited to read the next issue of your newsletter.
Know your audience. How will they benefit by reading your newsletter? The best newsletters hook readers issue after issue by supplying information, ideas, and advice they are eager to read. For example, a dietician's newsletter might include healthy, easy-to-make recipes. A newsletter for an independent film company might publish interviews with directors or actors. A business writer's newsletter might feature a list of writing contests and paying markets.
Especially if your readers pay to receive your newsletter, you want to make sure you give them information they want so each issue is worth the cost.
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