Monthly Newsletters allow you to stay in touch with your customers.
In a business there are two aspects of a relationship. The business side of the relationship – the mechanical: “I give you X, Y, Z for your $A.”
There is also an emotional aspect to the relationship. Any sales course will tell you that people buy for emotional reasons and then use logic to justify their reactions.
A monthly newsletter allows you to build the emotional component of the relationship.
Your emotional relationship is driven by:
- Shared Values
- Shared Background
- Shared Interests
- You being authentic
- Your bringing things your customers value to the relationship
In light of increasing commoditisation you may be able to sell a ‘commoditised product’ entirely on the back of the strength of your relationship. The easiest way to build a strong relationship is by actually investing in the emotional aspect of the relationship.
With a strong emotional relationship, your customers will remain loyal to you as long as the ‘business side’ of the relationship makes sense.
A monthly newsletter is the bedrock of that emotional relationship. It shows your customers that you care about them enough to go and write, print and post them something physical. You are willing to spend real money on them.
If it shows up on time, month after month, your customers will see it as a periodical and not a piece of advertising.
Your relationship is a two way street. Your readers need to care enough about you to engage with you in the first place. In order to build that level of interest in you, in your customers – that means you need to actively invest to build that relationship – i.e. a printed monthly customer newsletter.
Email is free – and your customers know it. Quarterly newsletters show you consider them an afterthought. I can forget a lot of things in 3 months. I bet you can too.
If you don’t work at building this emotional relationship then you face trying to retain customers purely on the strength of your business relationship. Then you are a commodity. Like for like. And your sources of repeat business and referrals – your customers, are going to defect.
You can prevent this by using your monthly newsletter to build a strong emotional relationship with your customers. So that they are less inclined to shop around.