Three Ways to Make Sure Your Newsletters are Read A newsletter is a great low-cost email marketing tool for startups looking to grow their business.

By Nidhi Singh

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When preparing to launch a startup, the first essential step entrepreneurs need to take is put a marketing strategy in place. However, for many startups marketing on a limited budget is not as easy as it sounds. The good news is that with growing impact of the internet, marketing your business doesn't have to cost a bomb. A newsletter is a great low-cost email marketing tool for startups looking to grow their business. Not only it keeps your customers engaged but also helps in building a great relationship with the masses.

But the real question is – how can startups make sure that their customers read the newsletter? Most of the newsletters that we get land up in spam and no one is even bothered to consider it useful or even worthy of a glance. It's like an unwanted intruder eating space in your mailbox.

That might sound discouraging but don't worry we have a solution for you! Entrepreneur India is sharing few tips for startups to create engaging newsletters that can maximize your subscriber list.

Do We Have Any Success Stories?

We have successful organizations like Chaukhamba Orientalia and Motilal Banarsidas, publishing newsletters customers are eager and waiting for the whole month to get a copy of. It all depends on the content and how we present it.

Give Them What They Want:

99% of the population don't read spam messages and emails on insurance policies or house loans unless they are in need. People don't care about what you have to offer unless it is what they want.

Founder of Healthhunt.in Pooja Duggal, shared her secret to having an outstanding click-rate on her company's personalized health newsletter-like tool called the health wire

"Instead of spending precious money on getting millions of irrelevant people to subscribe, try and reach out to the right audience - however small. The key is to personalize, so, the more you speak to their needs, the higher the chances of them getting hooked to your newsletter and even looking forward to it every day. There has to be a value adds to your target audience. Identifying that value-adds is the key," she said.

Map Consumers' Social Media Habits:

Rishu Gandhi, Co-Founder, Mother Sparsh believes for any email campaign the first thing that needs to be done is finding the target audience. Their database needs to be built after mapping their habits on social media and other online portals.

"The day one identifies the need of the customer, then a well-drafted mail with the apt subject line will make the target audience take a note of it and click it to know more about the offering. Using AI or any sales force tool with in-depth human monitoring will help to identify, segregate and target the right group of people who will open the newsletter. Similarly, targeted online ads play an important role as the target customer generates the recall and allows them to click the newsletter," said Gandhi

Keep it Simple:

A newsletter, after social media, is probably the best tool an organization has to establish a relationship with its customers and potential customers.

After having built two online marketplaces Letsintern.com and Chtrbox.com, Pranay Swarup, CEO & Co-founder at Chtrbox.com, realized that with newsletters one is always learning how to do it better. However, he also shared few tips for entrepreneurs to create a brilliant newsletter.

"Keep the content and tonality natural and relevant to who your brand and audience is. Every reader wants to feel that they're not being mass-emailed and that it's meant for them, so customize it as best as possible. Secondly, manage your database well. Allow users to unsubscribe if they want to, remove old redundant ids, and keep it updated with your latest customers and connections," said Swarup.

Wavy Line
Nidhi Singh

Former Correspondent, Entrepreneur Asia-Pacific

A self confessed Bollywood Lover, Travel junkie and Food Evangelist.I like travelling and I believe it is very important to take ones mind off the daily monotony .

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