One of the tools we like to use ourselves and with our clients with a regular email newsletter. Our favourite tool is Mailchimp for its flexibility, pricing, integration, and ease of use. We have used many other tools as well including Constant Contact and the email engines within marketing automation tools like Pardot and Hubspot. We have written many blogs in the past about the benefits of the email newsletter. It is an excellent tool to help with existing contacts and new prospects. This blog will highlight a few of the real life examples of where an email newsletter has helped with the sales cycle.
Stay Top-of-Mind With Clients
The first example of the benefit of an email newsletter happened with VA Partners. We have a regular email newsletter that goes out on a monthly basis. We include a mix of VA Partner and great third party content. We consistently get good opens and click-through rates. We had 2 examples of recently signed customers where we were able to stay top of mind through our email newsletter. In one case, a client from several years ago reached out for a new engagement and the other was a prospect we talked with 1.5 years ago that was not ready at the time.
It Still Works for Small Lists
We have a client that has a very specific solution that would only appeal to 500 to 1000 companies in the world. They have a small, but growing newsletter that gets great engagement. We have been able to find 4 quality opportunities over the past 2 months based on their interaction with the newsletter. These opportunities represent about $200,000 a year in revenue. We followed up specifically with messaging based on the links that they clicked through.
Great for Big Lists
One of our other clients has a large database of targets and an associated email list. They use a marketing automation tool as part of their marketing stack. The email newsletter gets a significant amount of interaction on a monthly basis. The lead scoring and interaction with the newsletter has given this customer an excellent list of targets that have shown interest with their targets.
Demonstrate Subject Matter Expertise
At VA Partners, we have a number of white papers that help demonstrate our subject matter expertise and are available for download. We have featured new and updated whitepapers in our monthly newsletter and have also sent out emails with the white paper as the sole focus. We did this again in March and it helped to lead to 50% more downloads than a typical month.
Drive Inbound Leads
The email newsletter is a great way to get a new lead from a website visitor. The newsletter is a low commitment for a potential prospect. Newsletters bring a significant number of new leads into VA Partners. My favourite recent story is from one of our clients. They recently had a prospect sign-up for a newsletter which would represent one of the largest opportunities for them in Canada. This was a contact that they were not aware of or in contact with.
We recommend an email newsletter for many reasons. It can be low cost with a big ROI. If you need help with your email newsletter or inbound campaign, please contact us to find out how we can help.
