Building Business with Email Newsletters 

Email offers producers a quick and inexpensive way to develop relationships with prospects and strengthen relationships with clients. But several challenges face email marketers. Following are some of those obstacles, along with tips on how to overcome them and build an email newsletter your clients and prospects will look forward to receiving.

Your mailing list
The first step is deciding who you’re going to email. You have your in-house customer list, as well as lists of prospects who have used the quote forms and auto-responders on your Web site. In addition, you can buy compiled or response lists. A compiled list is derived from sources such as directories, public records, and newspapers. For example, if you’re looking to sell group health insurance to auto body shops, roofers, or any other business class, the classic compiled list would be derived from the appropriate YellowPages listing. In other words, you should know exactly what you’re looking for. Typical compiled list vendors include LeadBot, InfoUSA.com, and SalesGenie.com.

Response lists consist of people who have responded to offers or made certain purchases — such as a subscription to a bridal magazine —  thus demonstrating unique demographic characteristics useful to marketers. Because these are made up of people who have opted into a group by virtue of their interest in something, response lists are preferable to compiled lists. Your best bet is to use a list broker for response lists.

Your content
Now that you have a list, what will you send them? If you already have some kind of relationship, you can remind them of the quote that your auto-responder sent them. If they are existing customers, you can tell them about new services your firm offers or other product information. In most cases, however, you are probably going to want something more than shameless self-promotion as content for your email campaign. Many agents build their credibility with a regular flow of news relating to the services they provide, such as life and health insurance, and tips on how to reduce costs or get the most out of their coverage — in other words, a newsletter. A regular email newsletter can build credibility, showcase your business, and demonstrate your expertise — but only if it is well-written and professional and provides useful information, not puffery.

When it comes to news stories, you can obtain them in one of two ways — you can purchase them from vendors or you can write them yourself. Many people think that anything they find on the Internet is fair game — definitely not a good idea. This can lead to charges of copyright infringement and fines. Even if you find something on the Internet that doesn’t have a copyright notice, it’s copyrighted unless it’s in the public domain. You can certainly rewrite news, but find someone in your firm who can write good, professional prose or your efforts will come off as amateurish.

Stories offering tips or advice can, likewise, be written by the agent sending the newsletter or purchased from a vendor. If you have practical experience, you should write these stories rather than farming them out. Many of the same vendors who sell such stories offer copyediting services to help polish up stories written by agents themselves.

The sign-up
If you’re using a purchased list, your first email should be an invitation to receive a free monthly e-newsletter containing valuable news and information. If you’re pitching new opt-ins, you may want to provide only teasers or just the headlines to the articles, with instructions on how to sign up to receive your e-newsletter automatically in the future. Once you’ve established a relationship with a prospect, your e-newsletter should go out at least monthly. Any less frequently and people may forget about their relationship with you, resulting in them unsubscribing or reporting your email as spam.

Be sure to comply with CAN-SPAM requirements and always provide an unsubscribe option to anyone you send unsolicited email to.

Avoiding the ‘spam’ reputation
One of the biggest problems confronting the email marketer is spam. Even if you have a relationship with the addressee, the spam filter may not like certain characteristics of your email. Internet service providers (ISPs) are getting less nitpicky about words such as “free,” “no risk,” “guaranteed,” and “insurance” — a prime spam filter trigger — as well techniques using all capital letters. Reputation-based filtering is becoming more the norm, where the most important things the spam filter considers are the reputations of the sending ISP and the sender (you). Some email hosting services offer a spam test you can use to identify potential spam problems.

Writing a subject line
If you’re sending an e-newsletter, one of the easiest ways to create a provocative subject line is to use a headline from one of your articles: “Medical Discount Cards — Savings or Scam?” Short is best. Including the recipient’s name can be helpful, and some marketers suggest using special characters (such as “++Identity Theft On The Rise++”), capital letters, and truncation (cutting off the end of the phrase, as in “Consumer Driven Health Care is Cutting…”). A completely different approach is to use your firm name in the subject line, relying on the notion that people will open your email because they recognize you and know what to expect.

Tracking your results
You should experiment and see what works best for you — which is one of best things about email marketing. With email, you can analyze the results of your efforts. You can find out not only who opens your email newsletter, but which articles they read. There are many good e-marketing service firms, many of which offer tracking and other services. Some firms provide both content and delivery and analysis services.

Be sure to take every opportunity to have people sign up for your email newsletter, especially on your Web site. Include ways for readers to pass along copies to others within your template and provide a link to your e-newsletter in your email signature.

Done well, an email newsletter is an excellent way to build your business at a low cost.

James Whitaker is president of Smart’s Publishing. He can be reached at jwhitaker@smartspublishing.com or 541-482-5189.