How Important are Newsletters?

Last week, I had a customer ask me, "How Important are Newsletters?"

I believe newsletter applications are the backbone of any online business. If you are not following up with your clients on a regular basis, then you are just throwing money out the window no matter what brick-and-mortor or online business model you follow. In the current economy, this just doesn't make any sense what-so-ever.

Newsletters can bring people back to your website, bring people into your Brick and Mortor store, or simply keep your brand at the front of their minds when they go to purchase your type of product next.

Newsletter software allows you to not only constantly stay in front of your target audience and strengthen your brand, it allows you to constantly upsell products and services to them (more about that later).

Pareto Principle (or the 80/20 Rule)

I constantly talk about the Pareto Principle (or the 80/20 Rule) with clients. This is the rule that I try to live my life by. It basically states that in any system 80 percent of the results  will be produced by 20 percent of the efforts. Applied to business, this means that 80 percent of your sales will be produced by 20 percent of your clients.

This is a very powerful principle and I've watched it double and even triple our own sales when we apply it correctly to our systems (sales, design, coding, whatever...) Heck I've used this principle with my email!

To read more about the Pareto Priciple go here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pareto_principle

In order to fully maximize this priciple, you must follow up with the people who have already purchased from you.

Backends

I also talk about backends with my clients constantly. Backends are simply a way for you to "upsell" or sell a complimentary product to the person who already trusts you and just purchased a product from you. The customer who had a good experience with you is much more likely to purchase a product than one that doesn't know you. 

Used in conjunction with the 80/20 rule, backends can have a profound effect on your business. Imagine if for every Widget A that Customer A buys from you, the also buy Widget B, C, and later D. With no backend system in place, you would only have sold Widget A -- 25 percent of the sales that you could have had.

If you are constantly in front of your customers, why would they go elsewhere?

You can use backends in your sales cycle with sales calls, direct mail, or (my favorite) emails. Of the three, emails produce the cheapest and easiest results.

What Software Do I Personally Use?

There are litterally thousands if not hundreds of thousands of newsletter software applications on the Internet. We have successfully been using one newsletter software - ListMessenger - for over five years and feel it fits the needs of most of our customers (as well as our own).

The main features we like about ListMessenger is that it allows for Text AND HTML newsletters to be sent. A lot of people read newsletters in HTML mode, but there are a lot of people (I'm one of them) that turn off HTML mode.  Another great feature is that the newsletter doesn't just cc or bcc people (which is a quick way to a spam filter), it sends out each newsletter individually one-by-one. This will keep you from triggering spam filters.

Other Newsletter Applications

We've also seen other packages that we feel comfortable enough with to recommend. Constant Contact is one of them. It has all of the features of the above software package as well as a few others. The only problem is that the costs tend to rack up the bigger your email list gets. With ListMessenger, you own the list and the software so the list size is irrelevant as there are no limitations on the software.

Conclusion

To wrap up, we feel that newsletters are such an important part of doing business online that we're actually working on our own newsletter application that fits right into CopyWrite CMS. It probably won't be out until close to the end of the year, but just know that we're currently working hard on getting it integrated in CopyWrite.

If you are interested in making money on the Internet, I highly suggest that you look into a newsletter application. If you would like our help, we'd love nothing better than to help, so give our talented staff a call at 979-696-2500 for a recommendation for your needs.

We currently sell a basic newsletter set up package at $495. We will set up the software and provide a professional design for the HTML newsletters that actually match your website design. And then on top of that we'll train you how to use the software! For something that will most likely double your sales, we feel this is a bargain!