Drive More Traffic With Your Newsletter

Posted by Alex Gorges on April 30, 2018 at 8:29 AM

Life’s a bundle of paradoxes. You think something should be the case, and then the opposite turns out to be true. Here’s one: the more you give the more you receive. How does that work?! By the rules of logic – if I give away 500 dollars, I have 500 dollars less. While on the immediate level, this makes sense, at a deeper level, you might gain far beyond and something more important than 500 dollars. Think of charitable giving. But the same rules apply to business.

Most people know the importance of creating compelling, persistent offers. It’s how you gather leads into your marketing funnels and convert them into sales. This in turn creates more profit. You may run a Facebook ad that offers 25% off any product for the next three days. Or you choose a buy one, get one free. Whatever the ad, it’s important to have a lot of them. So, let’s expand on this idea by talking about how to drive more traffic with your newsletter.

Drive More Traffic With Your Newsletter

The newsletter is more than a conduit of information between you and your customer. It’s a superb sales tool. If you have a newsletter today and want to drive more traffic, then create more offers. And to create more offers, follow these steps.

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Figure Out Your Audience

Who’s receiving your newsletter? Open your customer list and place the people on that list into categories. Here are a few examples to get started:

  1. What is their age?
  2. Are they male or female?
  3. What do they like? What do they dislike?
  4. What are their past purchases?
  5. What is their average income?

The more you can answer these questions, the better data you’ll have to create offers. If people fall into multiple categories, consider creating multiple offers. You can create an array of offers and then place those offers next to the name in your list. Then, when you do the mail merge, you’ll be able to use a specific offer for a specific person. You can even include different pictures to correspond with your offers.

Once you’ve pigeon-holed the people on your list, ask yourself what products or services would your customers like to receive?

Let’s say you own an orthodontics treatment center. Your average patient is 15 years old. What does a typical teenager want. What would get them most excited? Maybe a pair of speaker, shoes, a concert ticket? An iPhone? A smartwatch? The first few don’t cost much, so you can give them away. But an iPhone or smartwatch?!

You might think it’s not worth it. The iPhone X alone costs more than 1000 dollars after taxes. You might think that there’s no way you’ll make any profit if you give away something of that caliber. But try not to think of it that way. Think rather of the potential referral.

If Sally Jones goes to school the next day after hearing of this referral contest and tells her friends, who then tell their parents (who I presume are footing the bill), how many potential clients could you bring in? And if you only get two patients (probably even one) that will outweigh the cost of the iPhone. If you can do more, you’ll drive more traffic with your newsletter.

Weigh Risks vs. Rewards

Of course, use prudence when choosing the item. Before buying anything, weigh the cost vs potential sales. Ask how many leads does this item need to convert before it makes profit? And how much profit do want to make? Buying a cheaper item for your referral contest might seem wise (less you’ll deduct from the overall profit) but be aware that a cheaper item might drive fewer leads than a more expensive one.

Either way, affordable or expensive, it’s still an expense. And it’s only natural to feel hesitant, knowing that nothing could come from it. If the referral flops, you might be a big cost and have nothing to show for it.

But don’t let that scare you into throwing the referral out altogether. Any item will drive more traffic with your newsletter rather than no item. And the more valuable the item, the more potential profit you could make.

Newsletter Engagement

Let’s say your company offers cloud-based storage to people for a monthly subscription. Customers pay 15 dollars a month and receive secure, unlimited cloud storage. You’ve had a hard time in the past driving traffic to your business. You’ve used Facebook ads and Google pay per click. But you’ve had little success.

You email a monthly newsletter containing valuable information about data breaches, hard drive failure, and the importance of cloud security. You put a lot of work into it. Your company is small, and can’t afford a marketing director, so you must write all the content. Since it’s an e newsletter, you’ve installed some analytics to track engagement. Some are reading it. But most open it, scroll down half way on the first page, and then delete the email. That’s not the type of engagement you want.

So, here’s what you can do. Try including a fun game to drive more traffic with your newsletter, like a cross word, a word search. (Take a look at how we incorporate a crossword in ours) And most importantly, tie the game to the content. If you’re doing word search, create questions based on answers found within the various articles.

Now, that’s fun and creative, but it will still only attract a small number of people. You must do more. If a person completes your word search, give them a prize. Offer them five dollars off their next month of cloud storage or send them an Amazon gift card.

You might think that giving away five dollars here and an Amazon gift card there doesn’t amount to much, but it does. When you’re generous, people respond to you more. And the more generous you can be to your customers, the more profit you can potentially make.

But what if people are still not responding? Then like the referral contest, ratchet up the stakes. Consider giving away even more. Maybe a full month of free of cloud storage or a 30 dollar Amazon gift card. The trick is to get them to read the newsletter. You know your service is good and should be generating more profit. If it takes them reading your whole newsletter to believe it, then so be it. Hold a carrot before them and help them get through it.

Learn how to better engage your newsletter recipients.

Test Everything

If something doesn’t work the first time, then try something else. Don’t give up. Sometimes it takes many tries before something clicks. So, test, test, and test some more. You’ll never know how good an offer or referral is until you try it. Remember, your aim is to drive more traffic with your newsletter.

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Topics: Newsletters