Newsletters are a great way to keep in touch with your customers and bring them back to your website for promotions and informative news. Using simple web technology, newsletters can become an extension of your website without taking any additional time out of your day. Here’s how it works:
1. You sign up for a third-party email subscription service. We recommend MailChimp for their outstanding customer interaction and full-featured service.
2. A sign-up box is placed on your site, telling your visitors that they can sign up to receive email updates from you. You will want to specify how often they can expect it and what type of information will be included.
3. When a visitor signs up, they receive an email asking them to confirm their subscription. This prevents unwanted spam and fake sign-ups.
4. You post articles, news, tips and information to your site. These articles are picked up by your subscription service via the RSS feed and placed into a template that Left Right Labs creates to match your site’s theme elements, logo, etc.
5. Your branded newsletter is sent out to your subscribers on the day/time you choose or can be held in a queue until you manually activate it. If you choose the manual option, you can preview the newsletter before it is sent. (Previewing is a good idea the first few times to ensure the formatting and amount of content is on target.)
Tips:
- The newsletter can be setup to include full articles or just excerpts. We recommend using excerpts that function as teasers to bring visitors back to your site for further information or to take advantage of a special offer.
- Keep the number of articles to a minimum for each newsletter. Too much information is overwhelming and may cause people to unsubscribe. You may want to adjust your sending frequency a few times until you find the right balance.
- Promote your subscription service by putting the signup box in an obvious spot on all your pages such as the top of a sidebar. Be sure to mention it to customers in any paper and email correspondence.
- Your primary objective is to benefit the reader. Make sure the articles you include in your newsletter are beneficial to your customers and draw them to interact with your web site or your business.
- Most newsletter companies provide statistics to see how many clicks you get back to your site from the newsletter. This is a good way to gauge how your content is being received by your customers.
- Newsletter services can be used to send out urgent bulletins and special event invitations as well. You can also have separate lists for different groups of people or type of news.
Are you ready to add an automated newsletter to your site? Drop us a line and let’s get started.