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.

Promotional emails

You need to make sure that your customers have opted into receiving a regular newsletter, that way you will avoid accusations of being a spammer. A newsletter will enable you to build business by:

• Keeping you and your products uppermost in people’s minds
• Building a trust relationship with your customers, especially if your news letter is relevant, informative and news worthy. If it is too “salesy” you will turn repeat buyers off your business
• Establishes you as an industry expert – but only if you have something interesting and informative to say!
• Can prompt people to take another look at your web site which, of course, you keep updated.

If possible the newsletter can be targeted at specific customers who purchased a relevant product. For example if a subset of customers purchased a special walking boot, this may be an opportunity to cross sell other walking equipment. You can only realistically do this if you have a good customer database.

It may be an idea to add an incentive to encourage people to sign up for an email newsletter – maybe a 5% discount on certain parts of the range.

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;

L-SOFT 

EMAILLABS 

ISMAX 

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.