Newsletters are an incredibly powerful lead gen tool. With a well-developed newsletter program, you gain access to leads’ contact information, maintain steady connections with your prospects, and pick up referrals from forwarding.
There’s just one little catch: You have to be interesting.
What’s more, you have to sustain that interest over time, coming up with relevant topics and compelling subject lines every week. Here’s how to make your newsletter a must-read for leads and turn it into a lead gen engine.
Research Once, Write Twice (or More)
You and your content team have more to say than you think – and a lot of it comes from what you’ve already said. While you never want to recycle content as-is, your existing content is a rich mine for new insights that are compelling to longtime newsletter readers as well as new subscribers.
Let’s say you learn about a new way people are using your product. That’s an outstanding topic for a newsletter article about what you’ve discovered, but it’s just the beginning of what you can do with your knowledge. How about articles on multi-tasking products that includes the new information, how-to pieces on making the new idea work, and suggestions for other creative product uses?
Curate Carefully
Newsletters that aggregate content from multiple sources are proven lead generation winners, but only if you’re drawing from worthwhile sources in the first place. The key question here is whether you’d want to read the material yourself. Are the titles engaging? Does the subject matter align well with your audience’s interests? Do you keep quality high by choosing only sources that offer well-written, original content? Are you offering commentary and meta-content beyond a simple list of links?
Use Your Real Voice
Corporate language has its place, but your newsletter and blog should have a more conversational tone. When leads feel they’re seeing something written by a real person, not a machine programmed to spit out buzzwords. Go ahead and show a little character; your leads are people too, and they respond to content that feels less like a dry lecture and more like a person-to-person conversation.
Custom Built Solutions
Personalizing newsletters for leads is a surefire way to increase their interest in them, and with marketing automation technology, it’s possible to craft custom newsletters for your audience based on their preferences. You might, for example, include a webinar invitation to leads who have signed up for them in the past while using that space for a white paper offer for prospects who gravitate to downloadable material.
Your newsletter’s effectiveness as a lead gen tool is directly related to how engaging you make it, so keep it lively, fresh, and focused.
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