There are a few, however, that I have signed up for and enjoy receiving. The Boston Red Sox Newsflash comes to mind: It attempts to dull the pain felt by fans by offering a sneak peek at the following season’s schedule only a few weeks into the current one. Then there’s the Grateful Dead’s Newsletter—chock full of links to sites selling coffee mugs, stickers and other items.
Most of the newsletters I get, though, are blind mailings (spam, if you must). These are the uninvited newsletters that land in my mailbox with boorish regularity. (In addition to diet tips, I now know where you can pick up vintage Menudo videos, in case you’re looking.)
Though I have no idea what criteria the marketing researchers used to justify putting my name on any of these lists, it’s clear that someone, somewhere went to a lot of trouble to capture my email address. So why did the newsletter editors spend such little time crafting his or her message to me?
Answer: they didn’t care. It’s dirt cheap to send out a lot of emails, so they’ve theoretically lost nothing by sending me this stuff. But what the newsletter editors overlooked is that by sending me worthless newsletters, they have lost my respect or any chance that I’ll do any business with them.
For marketers, the most critical element of any successful newsletter campaign is to strike a chord—to create an emotional connection with the reader, listener or surfer, no matter how temporary, in order to compel them to finish absorbing the message. There has to be some relevance to create that attachment and without it, there’s simply no hope for the newsletter to deliver. Life offers too many other diversions; there’s always something else demanding a potential customer’s attention.
Good, well-written newsletters are valuable and inexpensive marketing tools. But in order to increase your chances of morphing a potential reader into a regular reader, and then, hopefully, into a customer, it’s best to adopt a simple, straightforward approach when creating newsletters. Following are some do’s and don’ts:
- Give the people what they want. They, presumably, have signed up to receive your newsletter for a reason. Whether that reason is to receive snow condition reports or to stay current on last-minute lodging deals, go heavy on what they’ve asked for and light on the other things.
- Engage your newsletter list every time you send it out. Ask a few questions designed to capture key information that you can use or ask a trivia question about some aspect of your company. Get folks involved by offering them rewards for answering. At Killington, Vt., we give away a vacation a week to random winners picked from a list of those who answer three questions about some aspect of the resort experience: What’s your favorite on-mountain lunch spot? What’s the one thing about the resort you’d most like to see changed? Each time you ask a member of your newsletter list for information to help improve their experience, you strengthen the bond between reader and resort and move a step closer to creating a long-term customer.
- Talk to customers one at a time, not to all 75,000 of them at once. You can’t respond individually to everyone, but that doesn’t mean you can’t approach them as individuals in the tone of the newsletter. Talk to them about the smell of burritos in your base lodge and the color of your April sunsets. It goes a lot further than typical, “Book Now! Act Now! and Buy Now!” calls to action.
- Don’t overdo it. This is a common newsletter blunder. Once you give in to the fact that the “Internet thing” really works, there’s a temptation to bomb your customer with messages. Resist it. If you say that your newsletter will arrive every seven to 10 days, then keep to that schedule. It’s perfectly O.K. to build in a “special-alert” clause onto your sign-up page, explaining you might send time-sensitive offers on occasion, but save those extra-messages for your best deals. Don’t send two weeks of daily notices about the President’s Week holiday no matter how tempted you might be.
- Don’t fahgeddaboudit. Equally annoying is the newsletter that never comes, or comes so sporadically that the reader focuses only briefly on the first few words before deleting it. Send it in the time frame you’ve promised.
- Don’t say too little. While many in the industry hold fast to the maxim “less is more,” at Killington we find that skiers and snowboarders want to be kept in the resort loop. The effectiveness of lengthy epistles will vary from list to list. Try your newsletter long and short and see how people respond.
Keep in mind that email and newsletter marketing are evolving fast and that styles constantly change. Stay on top of these changes by signing up for as many newsletters as you can stomach, but don’t limit yourself to your competitors. Look at other industries as well. You will gravitate toward a certain style of writing, a certain layout. Make note of everything you like and pay attention to the things you don’t like, whether it’s too many messages a month or the fact that the newsletter is sent as an attachment as opposed to just an email (anyone who has ever received a virus will string you up by your thumbs for doing this).
Above all, remember who your customers and prospects are. Some companies apparently make products or offer services that are sold well by carpet-bombing databases. This may work for PseudoDiploma Inc., but it doesn’t work for ski resorts. If you pay attention to selling your newsletter subscribers on the skiing and snowboarding experience first, and your lodging packages, lift tickets and season passes second, you’ll end up adding integrity to your message and credibility to your resort.
Steven Wright is director of communications and partnerships for Killington Resort, Vt.
