How to Use an Online Newsletter to Drive Sales

If you have a web site that is used to market and sell products that your company produces, having email addresses that you can legally market to may be a profitable asset to you. But, how do you capture the email addresses and keep the line of communication open to your potential customer?

Instructions

Difficulty: Moderately Challenging

Things You’ll Need:

• Web site
• a product that you're trying to sell
• interesting content that is pertinent to your customers

How to Use an Online Newsletter to Drive Sales

1. Identify a subject that your targeted customer may enjoy reading about. For example, if you are selling gourmet food, your subscriber may enjoy getting a weekly email from you with unique recipes using some of the gourmet food that you sell.
2. Once you identify what it is that your customers' may enjoy reading you must set up a place on your web site where you ask visitors to sign up for a free "newsletter". Tell the customers' briefly what they will be receiving on a weekly/daily basis in the online newsletter.
3. Once they sign up you should have an automatic response delivered to their email address. It's always a good idea to go ahead and put a link in the outgoing email that ask them to click on the link to verify that they did indeed sign up for the newsletter. This is a double opt-in and then you'll be sure that you are only sending emails to customers who really want them.
4. Now that you're receiving qualified email addresses, once you start sending the newsletters on a regular basis, with recipes, and information on your products you need to start placing small advertisements in your email newsletters. This is where the selling needs to happen.
5. Continue to build on this model. The more email names you reach on a regular basis and who become familiar with you through the weekly contact, the more your sales should increase.

Tips & Warnings

• Every other week or so, you should offer "special deals" to online customers in the way of coupons that appear in embedded in the weekly newsletter.
• It's very important to make sure your customers' opt-in. If not, you could be violating Can-Spam laws. Please make sure you check these before implementing this kind of business model.