Use E-Mail Newsletters to Grow Your Site's Traffic
Author: Jason Kassel

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Customers are time-constrained and hard-pressed to remember URLs. When they do spend time online, they are hunting for something specific. Contrast that with e-mail. Most people check their e-mail routinely. And when they do, they often scan or read nearly every message they get. It would be hard to stop them, especially when they receive e-mails that they requested from companies they trust. Savvy marketers recognize that they can earn a place in their customers' inboxes much more easily than they can stake their claims in cyberspace and at a lower cost.

From the customers' standpoint, these companies are making their home pages obsolete. The only home pages these customers know are the ones that routinely appear in their personal inboxes. In effect, companies have used opt-in e-mail to change the venue in which they are competing. In doing so, they have gone from fighting for attention online to enjoying predictable mindshare through newsletters and e-mail campaigns.

Companies seeking to replicate such results should follow these steps:

1.                   Make capturing e-mail addresses your top priority. You got them to come to your site. That is a major accomplishment. Now      how can you make sure they come back?

2.                   Do not let consumers vanish back into the anonymity of cyberspace. Assuming that completing a purchase is the only      desired outcome of a site visit is not only arrogant, it is self-defeating. Only a small fraction of visitors are willing to consider             an immediate purchase. The overwhelming majority of visitors look for information to make better purchase decisions. Use             this to your advantage.

3.                   Hold your customers' hands throughout the purchase process.

Marketers, whether they be professionals or otherwise, reflexively want to begin touting their own company's achievements. They want to climb onto the mountaintops and scream about how great they are, how many sales their company made, the partnerships they are forming, and how their product is the best thing to happen since sliced bread. It is probably a good thing that marketers have such high opinions of their products, but there is a major flaw in their behavior. Customers just don't care about those things.

If everything is a pure sales pitch, you will lose the privilege of communicating with them. Send them relevant information that educates and informs. This will build trust and brand equity. Appeal to the underlying needs and issues that fuel the decision to make a purchase. When they need something from you, they will know where to find you.

To keep your newsletter in the read and saved columns be sure to send information that is:

1.                   Relevant -- Does it speak to the customer's interests and not your own?

2.                   Anticipated -- Do you distribute on a regular basis so people expect your newsletter to arrive on a certain day?

3.                   Eagerly read -- Are you monitoring how readers are looking at your newsletter so you can alter it to conform to their interests?

In the long run, e-mail is a substance-over-style proposition. There will be an inevitable flight to quality or away from the practice altogether. Producing something that "looks good enough" will only get you through a few e-mails before you have burned up all your brand equity. If you are not providing value, click-through fade quickly and the unsubscribe requests mount.

More than anything, the Internet is an information resource. Companies that embrace this by opening e-mail dialogues with their customers and prospects will begin to channel it to their advantage.