Your newsletter lets you contact your most engaged customers (the people who actually want you in their email inbox!) with news, updates, and reminders about your business. If that’s not enough to convince you to set up your email newsletter, here are 5 more good reasons to start today:
- Your newsletter brings customers and potential customers back to your website or blog.
- You get to tell your subscribers where to engage with you online and in person. (on social media, at upcoming trade shows, etc.)
- Your business stays top of mind.
- Emails are convenient – Your subscribers may prefer to receive updates directly, rather than going to your website.
- You can track email campaign results to learn what’s working and what your customers are responding to.
1 // Getting Started
There are subtle differences between the various email marketing services, but we use and recommend MailChimp because it’s easy to navigate, simple to customize your newsletter, and it’s free when you have under 2000 subscribers. Go to the MailChimp website and create your account.
2 // Creating Your Mailing List
If you already have a mailing list, MailChimp makes it easy for you to copy and paste from an Excel document. Simply click Lists > Create List and follow the steps! If you’re building a list from scratch, MailChimp can help you create a simple sign up form that people can use to subscribe to your mailing list (here’s a handy page on creating your sign up form).
Get your sign-up link out there (pssst, here’s ours)! Add it to your website, and send the link to friends, family, and current clients who you think will be interested – with a personalized note if you can!
3 // Designing Your First Campaign
We recommend having an idea of what you’d like your newsletter to look like when it arrives in someone’s mailbox. Save some of your favourite newsletters for reference and write down what you like about them: Is there a colourful header? Are there a lot of pictures or is it mostly text? Is the newsletter laid out as one column or two?
To create your first email, click Campaigns > Create Campaign > Regular Campaign.
You will get to pick a template, and then drag and drop elements into your email to customize how it’s designed.
Once you’re happy with your design and content, send yourself a test email to see if it arrives how you envisioned it.
If you love what you’ve created, you will be able to use it as a template for your next newsletter.
4 // Sending Out Your Newsletter
After finishing your design (and after proofreading + checking all the links work!), click Confirm at the bottom of the page to confirm your campaign. You can either Schedule it for a specific date and time or you can Send the campaign immediately.
5 // Monitoring Performance
After your email is sent out, you’ll be able to see how your campaign is doing in the Reports tab. Click around and get familiar with the metrics that matter to you! What links did users click on? Do photos get more clicks than text links? What can you improve on for your next newsletter?
MailChimp will automatically delete users from your list if your email to them bounced (for example, if the customer’s email address is no longer in use), or if they choose to unsubscribe from your list… So you won’t have to worry about cleaning up your list!
And that’s it! With every newsletter you send out, you’ll gain more insight into what your audience likes – adjust accordingly, and enjoy getting to know your community a little bit better.
Kindly note: We don’t like to refer to ourselves as “experts”, but we do take great pride in sharing our business advice, distilled down from our extensive research and (often) mind-blowingly frustrating experiences we’ve endured and learned from. We try our best to create a clear and humble approach to good business tactics that you and your teams can understand and turn into effective and productive revenue streams. We are actual, real people and look forward to supporting you in any way we can, whether it’s on the topic of this post, or other business development and marketing communications you may be involved in, or considering. We are proud of the services we provide; if you don’t see what you’re looking for, just ask us – we also take pride in being super responsive!