Everybody seems to be setting up and using email newsletters for their business these days. If you haven’t got an email newsletter yet, here are some very good reasons why you should have one:

1. It’s a very good way to engage with prospective customers. Modern marketing is all about engagement. Hardly anyone buys something on impulse from a company they’ve never heard of before.

By having a newsletter you can inform people, educate them, entertain them, make them laugh and a whole load of other things. At the end of all that they’re more likely to buy.

2. It’s a very good way of keeping in touch with existing customers. Your existing customers are more likely to buy again, so it pays to keep offering them more products and services from time to time. A newsletter is a more effective way of doing it than just feeding them ads.

3. It has good ‘freebie value’. Everyone likes receiving something for free, and offering them useful free information is much more effective than trying to get them to read your advertising material.

4. It’s a way of selling that’s not salesy. Newsletters send news, information, ideas, thoughts, reviews and the like. These are much more valuable and more likely to be taken seriously than an ad. – even if they lead to an ad. somewhere along the line. It’s an under-the-radar, guerilla way of selling if you like.

5. It’s personal. There’s just something that feels better about receiving a letter than receiving a piece of advertising literature. Recipients are more likely to read it, and more likely to act.

6. It makes you look like an expert in your niche. You benefit from ‘published author’ status. You’ll be regarded as much more knowledgeable and experienced than your competitors who don’t have newsletters.

7. It builds trust. As prospects read your newsletter and begin to see that what you say is useful, valuable and above all true the more they will trust you. And nowadays building trust is vital when making sales and building a business.

8. It can be extremely cost effective. Much cheaper than paying for newspaper or magazine ad. space or sending out a sales letter. (And more environmentally friendly too.)

9. It’s a good way of maintaining your mailing list. As long as recipients keep opening your mailing list (and there are ways of knowing if and when they do and what they read) you know that they’re still interested in what you’re offering.

10. It’s great for sharing and social media. Recipients can easily send your newsletter to their friends or out into their social media networks. A popular newsletter could easily be presented to hundreds of new prospects this way.

11. It’s a good way of getting feedback. On what marketing methods and business strategies work and which don’t. Recipients are usually pretty quick to let you know what they think. You can even do surveys.

12. It’s great content marketing. You can also post your newsletters to your website or blog, by way of an archive. It should help your website get found and encourage visitors to keep coming back even if they don’t subscribe to your newsletter.

In short, there’s every reason why you should have an email newsletter and hardly any reasons not to! Plus it’s very easy to set up and run one at very low cost.

The not-so-good news …. it’s not so easy to create great email newsletters that people will want to open and want to read week after week. If you’d like some help with creating and writing great email newsletters drop me an email at mark @ markhempshell.com