E-Newsletters & Social Marketing
The objective of a newsletter is ultimately sales, of course. One of the most important measures is whether people read it. If the recipient doesn't open the newsletter, it won't have much impact or benefit.
Who needs a newsletter? Anyone with a service or product. Most especially, real estate developers, plastic surgeons, dentists, medical clinics, and other professional services. The e-newsletter can be for the purpose of generating repeat business, or capturing new customers.
Are they expensive? No ! And for the response and results, they are inexpensive. My newsletters usually have excellent open / read rates (over 15% in many cases, nearly always over 5%) and "immediate website visits" (over 2%). I can verify those numbers for you, on request, online via a third-party organization.
It takes experience and studying the connection between the tracking statistics and the content and images, to understand what will yield the results you want.
How do you find a newsletter writer who can not only build your image properly, but convey the right messages and help generate sales leads? The good news: you have found one!
As a rule, if the newsletter will delve into a narrow technical topic, you need a true expert in, say, microchip design and style won't matter as much.
If you're building a relationship with consumers to sell real estate, you need an editor like me with broad business experience, so that the reader senses competence and confidence across a wide variety of topics. If you're selling enterprise software, your editor should understand how the enterprise works, and how software fits into it - and absolutely crucial - what marketing messages your B2B target reader has absorbed over the years.
Remember, with newsletters, while it's often a tedious task to link readership directly to sales completed, but the generally accepted measure of newsletter success is readership. With the systems I use, you'll know how many recipients read the e-mail newsletter, how many times they opened it, and how many clicked through to your website. What's more, you'll know which individual subscriber read and clicked through.
Technology
Editor on Call uses different methods to send e-newsletters. For smaller lists, under 20,000 I typically use a commercial system with excellent tracking. This would be too costly for a large list (50,000- plus) so I use a proprietary system geared to massive deliveries. Unlike systems like Interspire and others that are publicly available, my system varies each e-mail and its send timing slightly, so it does not appear to be spam.
Social Marketing
For some businesses, social marketing can be very cost-effective in generating attention and sales. Social media has some very attractive features; first and foremost, if “followers” like what they see, they can easily help spread the message – they become a self-powered marketing channel.
"Nothing we can do in marketing was as powerful as the newsletter that Mr. Brant wrote for us every two weeks. In a very challenging market, his writing generated excellent response rates that outpaced everything else we do - websites, videos, seminars, press releases - to generate leads and sales." Pete Scott, Director of Sales, Wyndham Resort & Condominiums, Costa Rica
