Effective newsletter marketing is really about getting a selling message into your newsletter and getting it read. It can’t read like an ad or a commercial. You need to keep your customer’s perception of your newsletter as news. Not advertising, otherwise most of the upside of doing a newsletter is wasted.
Thankfully, the advertising world has been on to this for years. To this end they have created a format that is used the world over in print and every other media to make a sales message look like editorial. Solving the problem of creating effective newsletter marketing without overtly advertising in your newsletter
(Re)Introducing the Advertorial:
The way to ‘sneak’ marketing into your newsletter
Advertorials is where you provide 90% content and then the final 10% of the piece is a subtle push towards taking action. The content part of an advertorial is about the problems or the benefits desired by your market.
Say you need to write an advertorial about car care. It is as simple as writing an article about how to do a great job cleaning your car. You talk about the common problems they’ll have, what tools they can buy to make the job faster and how good their car will look after it has had its regular cleaning.
Only at the very end do you mention that they can buy the car care products you mentioned in your article at your store and they happen to be on special…
It means you are effectively marketing without overtly marketing. Your customers will love the information.
Admittedly, it takes a little more skill to write an effective advertorial than a straight ‘hard sell’ message but it does keep the customer happy by providing useful information in your newsletter. Effective customer newsletters {link to ‘effective customer newsletters’ to post of same keyword} are about information not advertising. Especially not just a straight sales pitch.
That is the way to make newsletter marketing effective without turning your newsletter into another piece of junk mail.