I don’t know if I’m the only one, but I resisted sending newsletters for my small business for actual years. My business was almost four before I started sending consistent newsletters, and that wasn’t even a year ago.
What on Earth would I say that wouldn’t cause them all to unsubscribe en-masse?
How could I possibly entice people to want to subscribe to hear from me in the first place?
Then I realised, I was creating way more work for myself than I needed to, as at the time I was producing podcasts and already writing regular blog posts. There was also a lot of stuff I wasn’t shouting about within our business, and I realised that my subscribers were a wonderful hybrid of followers from various platforms and places across the internet – so my Newsletter could absolutely replicate that by also pulling my content together.
The absolute first thing I do is repurpose a blog post as the main article of the Newsletter, without promoting a blogpost I’m hoping that someone will Google it and I’ll show up – so this puts it under the nose of my audience and the chances are they haven’t already read it. That being said, I always wait a few months from when it’s initially published to when I include it in my Newsletter, in case they did read it. I’ve written an entire blog post about why repurposing is a wonderful idea here so I won’t go into it again.
I only include a condensed version or excerpt from the blog post, so there’s still reason for them to click-through onto my website and read the whole thing, then hopefully feel motivated to click on my services, maybe book a call and wouldn’t it be lovely if then sign as a client? That’s the dream anyway.
Next I include a sort-of round up of things within the business. We finish around 2 new websites a month, so there’s generally always one to shout about. Each website brief is slightly different, so it’s good to point out the uniqueness of each project and it’s nice for the client to have some clicks onto their shiny new site!
I’ll include a ‘Client Spotlight’ which showcases one of our Social Media or SEO clients, again they all have varying briefs and I like to document how flexibly we work for everyone. It’s also nice to show that we do have real clients, and again we’re lucky to include a different one each and every month so it shows the variety of our work and how busy we are.
Lastly in the little roundup, I include one of our services. It’s just a place to say ‘yo, did you know we do X?’. It just jogs their memory of exactly what it is we offer, and potentially they may not have realised some of the other services we can perform.
I always, always finish my Newsletters with a brand new and from-the-heart thank you. As I said at the beginning of this blog post, I’m forever unsure if what I have to say is interesting enough – so I appreciate every single person who reads my Newsletters. I don’t feel as though a copy & paste or auto-populated ‘thanks for reading’ would cut it.
Then of course, our social links – never one to miss an opportunity for a new follower me!