Over the last two weeks in this blog, I’ve been looking at the problem of losing clients and how to keep them. One of the best ways to keep your clients and build up loyal relationships is by keeping in touch with them. Email newsletters are just one way of doing this.

You probably receive a large number of email newsletters into your inbox every month – unless you’ve unsubscribed from them all because they’re no good! The ones you do receive are probably deleted rather quickly – and I don’t blame you. Too many people publish newsletters that are badly written, contain poor content that you can’t use or arrive on your screen far too often. They don’t put enough focus on the clients who are receiving them.

However, there are some newsletters that are well written and proof read; they focus on your needs and contain ideas that you can actually use. The good ones arrive just when you were wondering if it was about time the next issue came around.

How do Email Newsletters work?

Every month for the last 13 years I’ve been writing and publishing my own newsletter, Scribbles on the third Wednesday of the month. (Before that I used to post printed copies to my clients every month!) You can read some past issues here.

Each month, I focus on a different aspect of marketing and give my clients practical advice that they can put into action for their business. Occasionally I might include a sales piece about a workshop I’m running, or a book to buy. But most of the newsletter is just full of useful content.

In 2012 I met David as we were recommended to him. He asked me to do some marketing for his business. We worked together for about a year to get his marketing on track. Over the next couple of years we exchanged the occasional email and passed referrals back and forth. All the while, David received his monthly copy of Scribbles.

Earlier this year, David replied to an issue of Scribbles that I sent out. The topic was LinkedIn, but David actually asked me about email newsletters. Could I help him put one together for his business? Of course I could and that’s exactly what we’ll start doing this month. It’s taken a few years for David to become an active client again, but it didn’t even take a newsletter about newsletters to encourage him to ask me about them!

Do newsletters still work? If you write useful, practical content for your clients and you keep doing it on a regular basis, then yes, email newsletters do work. When you are consistent (as with any marketing activity) they can be one of the most cost effective ways of keeping in touch with your clients. So my newsletter Scribbles will continue to appear in clients’ inboxes on the third Wednesday of each month for as long as they want to receive it! If you’d like to receive your own copy, click here to fill in the sign up form.

If you need any more advice about how to use a newsletter to keep your clients, then do get in touch. If you actually want someone to write and publish a newsletter for you on a regular basis, then call us on 01635 578 500 or email me at Chantal@Appletreeuk.com and we can talk about how we can do this for you.