A Powerful Marketing Tool – A Printed Newsletter
If you’re already producing a monthly customer newsletter, keep up the great job. If you’re thinking about starting one for your business, wait no longer – it will prove to be the best decision you’ve ever made!
Here’s why: Newsletters are relatively cheap to produce, they provide valuable information, and they keep your name in front of your customers, prospects, and former customers.
You can choose to do a paid, informational newsletter (such as this one), or a free, marketing based newsletter, depending on what outcome you want.
Why is it important to send a newsletter regularly? Because testing has shown that newsletters lose their impact when they arrive with less frequency. Essentially, when you’re out of sight, you’re out of mind. And while you’re out of mind, your customers are being bombarded with marketing messages from competitors. That’s not good.
Let’s look at how practical and profitable it is to mail your customers a monthly newsletter. Assume that your cost to design, print, and mail a monthly customer newsletter of 2 to 4 pages is $4.00 including postage, or about $48 per year. As long as you can recoup the costs via future sales, then it’s worth doing.
Bear in mind that few businesses send printed newsletters these days because they believe that email and the Internet are superior tools. I disagree. They have a value, but print is superior in many ways. It gets noticed, readers prefer it in many cases, and they tend to consume it while being less distracted.
“… they keep your name in front of your customers, prospects, and former customers.”
In his book Automatic Marketing, author Benjamin Hart writes about the awesome power of a monthly newsletter and gives a great “dollars and cents” illustration of how important newsletters are to your business. He breaks it down as follows.
If the profit on your average sale to a customer is $100, you would have to make only one sale every 10 years to that customer to break even on your newsletter.
But what if the profit on your average sale is $300 or even $l,000? If you’re a lawyer, a plastic surgeon, or a CPA, or you sell office supplies or printing to businesses, your profit per sale could easily be thousands of dollars.
Maybe you run a restaurant, a dry cleaner, or a hair salon, and your profit per sale is only $20. But if you can get your customer to come in once a month, that’s $240 in profit per year from that customer—all for a marketing cost that’s extremely low.
Can you see why sending a monthly newsletter to your customers, prospects, and former customers is like having an ATM machine with an unlimited source of cash that you can withdraw any time?
I urge you to consider doing a newsletter for your customers. They’ll appreciate it, and you’ll find yourself with more loyal customers as a result.
May 27th, 2009 at 7:57 pm
Great comment and sharp observation… especially coming from a renowned ONLINE marketer!