8. No Corresponding eNewsletter
Driving new customers to your website is important. Nevertheless, the most cost-effective sales you will make are to your existing customers. How will you get these folks to come back to your site once they have learned to dive?
Obvious answers including putting your web address on business cards, flyers, paper newsletters, yellow pages ads — virtually everything you put in print. You also want to tell customers about your website any time your interact in person or over the phone.
It is not enough, however, to just make customers aware of your website; you need to give them a reason to visit. This includes:
- Having up-to-date information on classes, trips and activities.
- Including information on new equipment items.
- Regularly adding “how to” articles that will help customers make diving easier, safer and more enjoyable.
You can’t afford to wait until your customers discover this information on their own. You need to tell them where to find it. That’s where eNewsletters come in.
Thanks to services like Constant Contact, more and more stores have discovered how easy it is to send regular, professional-looking eNewsletters to everyone on their mailing list. The problem is, many (if not most) of these stores don’t appear to understand the important relation between their eNeewsletters and their website.
What we see most often are overly long eNewsletters that attempt to pack all of the pertinent information in the eNewsletter itself, with no links back to the store’s website.
Unnecessarily long eNewsletters are almost never read in their entirety. This means many customers miss information that would specifically interest them, because they can’t be bothered to wade though mountains of text to find it.
The most effective eNewsletters are short — seldom more than just a few paragraphs. Each paragraph provides an overview of a page on the store’s website, with a link directly to that page. This allows readers to quickly identify information they find relevant, then read about it in depth on the website. It has the further benefit of simply getting your existing customers to spend more time on your website.
The bottom line is, your eNewsletters and website need to work hand-in-hand. Effective e-mail marketing is a lengthier topic than we can address here — but you can find answers in related articles on building your mailing list and using it effectively.
::: TOP ::: SUBSCRIBE ::: CONTACT US ::: ABOUT US :::
