The newsletter you email to prospects is an important part of building your Ecommerce business.  But your current newsletter may not be effectively building relationships with your prospects.  So here are a few ways of boosting your email newsletter’s effectiveness:

Make Signing Up Easy

A common mistake many online businesses make is having a sign up form with a lot of required fields.  Many people will not take the time to fill out such forms, even if they’re somewhat interested in the company and what’s offered.  All you need from prospects is their email address, so make the email address the only required field in your mailing list signup area.

Have Your Subscription Form Everywhere

There’s no better way of discouraging people from signing up for your mailing list than making it difficult to find your signup form.  The harder it is to find, the fewer signups you’ll have.  So have a small yet prominent section on all your website pages for prospects to register for you mailing list.

Deliver Valuable Content

With the amount of information people receive via email today, their attention span for any one email is small, so it’s very important you only send information that will be interesting to your prospects.  Keep in mind that your prospects will be at different stages in the buying process, so they’ll have different interests.  Therefore, consider having separate newsletters for people in research mode and people in buying mode with content tailored toward each.

Less Frequency Is More Interest

Absence makes the heart grow fonder, and that’s true of newsletters too.  So don’t send you newsletters out more than once every 2 weeks.  Send out more than that and you risk being ignored completely.  If you send them less than that you risk being ignored or not top of mind when they’re about to make an important decision on their home buying.

Always Use Permission-Based Marketing

When dealing with email prospects, don’t just assume your interaction gives you the right to add them to your mailing list.  Doing so violates Canada’s privacy laws and (even worse) may get you spam complaints from your ISP.  So make sure you ask people for their permission to add them and receive their consent before adding them to you mailing list.  That way, if you do ever get any spam complaints, you’ll be able to prove that you have a fully opt-in, permission based mailing list.

I teach more about using email to build your Ecommerce business in my course The Awesome Power Of Email.  This course was been approved by the Registrar, REBBA 2002 to qualify for 4 Credits.