April is finally here! I hope you all had a good month and I wish you a good start to April. And so you can give your businesses a boost during this first week of April, I am going to talk about email marking strategies that you can use to attract more subscribers for your newsletter lists. Are you ready?

But, hold on… what’s an email marketing strategy?

Email marketing is a type of marketing which is done through emails. Logical, isn’t it? Today, I am going to talk about newsletters in specific. A Newsletter is an email that you send on a regular basis to a list of users that must have been subscribed beforehand. I’m sure that at this point, you are all subscribed to any newsletter of your favourite brands or companies and are receiving periodic emails from them. Well, now it’s up to you to do the same for your audience!

Why do I need to implement email marketing strategies in my business?

A newsletter is the best way to have regular direct communication with your audience. You can talk to them directly and build long lasting relationships with your audience. People who subscribe to your newsletter are normally people that are interested in what you do and want to know more about you and your business. They are the most valuable aspect of our businesses and we need to care about them and offer an added value. They deserve it, and that’s my philosophy when I first created my newsletter.

Through a newsletter, you can offer a monthly summary of the changes and improvements that you have implemented in your business and ask them for their opinion or you can offer them new and exclusive information that they may find interesting. The key is to communicate with them in a way that they feel that there is someone behind your business. Because…

[Tweet “The strongest weapon in business is to make your audience feel. – David Miralles.”]

All this will be translated at some point into a higher rate of conversion and more sells in your business. This is because email marketing is one of the marketing techniques with higher conversion rate (7%).

Ok, you convinced me. How can I create a newsletter?

Among all the email marketing platforms available out there, I would recommend these ones:

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• Aweber
• Mailchimp

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• Constant Contact
• Campaign Monitor

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And my favourite one? Without a doubt, Mailchimp. Why?

One of the main reasons is that MailChimp joined the Safe Harbour Framework and complies with the legislation regarding Data Protection, so I don’t have to worry about it and the data of my audience will be safe and protected.

Its interface makes very easy to design and create template and emails. I will probably talk about how to design emails later on. By now you can give it a try and let me know your thoughts about it!

Just bear in mind that:

• You will have to create an account in any of the platforms I have mentioned.
• You will have to create a form and embed it to your website as I did with the one that I included in the lateral bar of my blog:

Get free tips to develop your business!

• Make sure that all the emails that you send are personalised. Nobody want to read a machine in his inbox, right?
• You will have to make an effort to attract your audience to this form so they can subscribe. You can’t add people to your newsletter list without their permission. It’s illegal.
• Don’t forget a good call-to-action in your website!
• You can integrate you email campaign with Google Analytics to analyse their impact!

How can I convince my audience to subscribe to my newsletter?

Let me talk about some of the strategies that I use and the ones that have worked the best for me.

• Let your audience know what you are offering. Be honest and tell them what you are going to offer to them. Are you going to talk about your business? Are you offering tips or valuable information? What topics are you going to talk about? For example, in my case, I offer tips on business and marketing that my subscribers can implement in their businesses to give them a boost. I also shares strategies and changes that I implement in my business and may be useful for my audience. If you don’t want to miss this month’s tip, subscribe now or never! I’ll send it tomorrow!
• Share something of value and exchange it. You can create a short ebook related to any topic that your audience may be interested in and offer it only to your subscribers. You can also create a to-do list, DIY project, a compilation of X, a infographic, an exclusive video… And the list goes on and on. Be creative an offer something of value. Bear in mind that this “something” must be something that you have created for your audience, something that belongs to you.
• Offer exclusive content. That’s what I did with this blog post, for example. I only shared the password with my subscribers, because they deserve to have the most exclusive content. And it raised some good comments I must say. (Thanks!)
• Sum up in a sentence what’s your aim with your newsletter. And use it and a call-to-action to attract your audience as I did: “Get free tips to develop your business”. You can also ask a question.
• Plan how often are you going to send them and the contents of each of them. I would need a whole blog post to talk about this, and probably I will elaborate on it later on. Don’t send random emails every now and again. Your audience must know when to expect email from you or they will get tired and will unsubscribe from your newsletter. It’s also important to plan the contents of your emails. If you don’t plan ahead, you will be more likely to make wrong decisions that will damage your email marketing.
• Segment your lists and offer customised content. For example, if your audience are Spanish and English speakers, you can segment your subscribers in two different lists and get your newsletters translated by a professional translator specialised in marketing, so it can have the same impact in both languages. My advice: if you have a blog, have a look at the different categories of your content, and create lists depending on the specialisation of your audience.

What about you? Do you use any email marketing strategies? How do you do to attract your audience to your newsletter? I want to hear from you!

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