How to Build Traffic and Enhance a brand with EASY Newsletters

Hello and welcome to the podcast for Small Business EASY Branding Tips.  Brought to you by SSS for Success (EASY Brand Marketing Specialists), working to help Small Businesses Survive through EASY Sales. 

This week’s topic is: “How to Build Traffic and Enhance a brand with EASY Newsletters”.  In a previous post, I talked about “The Basics of Branding and Why Anyone Can Do It”.  In that post, I detailed the 4-Step Common Sense Branding Strategy that I think most small business owners should be aware of when seeking to create, build, and enhance their company’s brand.  
Those steps were: 1^st: Determining & Defining Your Brand. Step 2: Researching Your Market and Positioning Your Brand to Capitalize on a Sector of it. Step 3: Launching Your Brand. Step 4: Managing, Monitoring & Tweaking Your Brand (Note: That’s “tweaking” your brand, meaning make minor revisions, not tweeting your brand, which is more so a function that occurs under Step 3).  

In this week's post, we talk about how to use newsletters and email marketing to build bring traffic either to your blog or to your website, and to enhance your overall brand, so we’ll specifically be talking about Steps 3 and 4. 

There are a number of reasons why creating and disseminating a regular newsletter is important for building traffic and enhancing a brand:

1. It builds your reputation as an information resource to your core audience, and it lets your audience know that you know what you’re talking about.
2. It keeps you connected with your audience, and it gives you the opportunity to stay relevant and provide useful information that your audience will appreciate.  
3. If you sell things, or at one point will want to promote something, it’s a great way to have a “pre-sold” audience who trusts you and your opinions.
4. It helps you build traffic and enhance your brand, while engaging in activities that help your bottom line. 

Here's a brief rundown of what I discuss further in this week's podcast.  Here are the steps you can take to get started with email marketing and producing a newsletter with very little money:
 

• Establish a web presence (if you haven't already): If you don’t have a website, visit this quick guide on Web Publishing:  maximizingthenet.com/web/webpublishing.html
• Sign up for an Email Marketing Service:  I’m currently using MailChimp under their “Forever Free” program that allows you to have up to 500 subscribers and send 3000 emails per month.  MailChimp is very easy-to-use and they have excellent support that is always timely and responsive to queries.  Feel free to click the badge below to get started with your "Forever Free" MailChimp Subscription.  Another option you have is one of the market leaders in email marketing would be Constant Contact.  They have monthly plans that start as low as $15 a month, and they offer a lot of additional solutions like online surveys, event marketing solutions that assist with planning events including tracking registration and payments for events.
• Add people to your list (ethically):  I want to emphasize “ethically” because there are rules and regulations to how you can add people to your list.  For instance, just sending a blanketed business-related email to everyone in your email address book can be considered “spam”, especially if you did not acquire their email through a legitimate business transaction within the last 18 months. Remember: Do not randomly add people to your newsletter list without their permission.  
• Use the tools of your Email Marketing Service:  MailChimp lets you not only see statistics on who opened your newsletter and when, but also what they clicked on, and if they forwarded it to someone.  You can set up automated messages or “autoresponders” that send a message to your mailing list (or even only a subset of the mailing list that you identify) at a specific time or date in the future. 
• Create Interesting Topics: As a general rule of thumb try writing one (1) newsletter article per week, and work on creating “evergreen content”, which is “timeless” content that can be reproduced again over the years without much information that gets “dated” quickly.  One great tip I would suggest would be to write out in advance, 52 topics that you’d like to hit with your newsletter within a year. 
• Watch the Analytics of Your Newsletter: Use that information and analyze it for what it’s telling you about your audience.  What do people click on most? What doesn’t get any clicks?  What type of subject lines get opened the least?  And be sure to integrate a feedback survey at some point, to get feedback from your subscribers and find out what they think of your newsletter directly.

Speaking of which, be sure to complete this “Small Business Branding Tips Blog Survey”, and if you’re a Small Business Owner that’s been in business for a while, please complete this survey as well.

Please keep in mind that we here at SSS for Success (EASY Brand Marketing Specialists) are always here to help, either by providing services as an "Email Marketing Branding Specialist" producing newsletters content and publishing them on your behalf, or via our Social Media & Technology Training Packages to help you get a better grasp on email marketing tools and how you can learn to use them for yourself.

Note: Within the next few weeks, I’m going to have a podcast episode devoted entirely to questions and answers from you, my listening audience, so please submit your Small Business Branding Questions for that upcoming episode.  You can visit our website sss4success.com and go to the Contact Us page to submit your question, or reach out to us via email at “podcasts @ sss4success.com”, or finding us on Twitter (@sss4success), or leaving a comment below.

Finally, if by chance, you would like to learn more about how EASY Sales can help your bottom line, then give us a call at 615-336-4325.

Have a great day!
Kindra Cotton

  

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