e-skills UK Guide: Email newsletters
Using email newsletters and communications to get more business from existing customers
Most people in business will understand that it is easier to get repeat orders from an existing customer rather than try and find a brand new prospect and close a sale with them.
One way in which you can sell more to your existing customers is to keep them informed of new products, offers and developments so they see you as a regular supplier. Using newsletters sent by email is a perfectly valid way of generating this business, as long as you stick to the rules. If you don’t you risk upsetting your customers and making sure they never buy from you again!
We suggest that you read this Guide alongside Promoting your business using email. These guides are related, but this guide tells you how best to communicate with existing customers, the other guide how best to get new customers safely using email.
We can’t tell you how to write or design promotional messages in this guide, but we can give you advice on how to manage the distribution and responses you get.
Managing email lists
This will be at the heart of your campaigning. Using products such as Microsoft Outlook it is fairly straightforward to manage your contacts and create sub-lists of people that may have opted in to receive your newsletter. You need to keep this list fresh, so it may be an idea to place “opt-in” tick boxes on all of your literature so that you get a steady stream of new names – hopefully.
Every newsletter emailing should have an unsubscribe option in case someone wishes to remove themselves from your list.
The following software way help in managing your email lists;
Newsletter format
An email can be sent out as text only, HTML or both. With an HTML format you will be able to produce a fancy looking newsletter with graphics but these may be corrupted by some email programs. It is probably best advice to keep the email format in simple text and encourage those interested to visit your web site by including a direct link to a specific page.
Email newsletters and the law
Promotional email is subject to the Privacy and Electronic Communications (EC Directive) Regulations 2003. Under the regulations you need to build in a process to record and honour requests from contacts should they no longer wish to receive future emails. Some people can get very angry if they receive what they consider to be unsolicited emails, so it is strongly recommended that you follow the letter, and spirit, of the law.
Commercial suppliers
We do not recommend specific products or suppliers; instead we provide you with a representative sample which covers the range of suppliers/products available. You may choose to look at these suppliers or products but this is entirely at your discretion.
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