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You will want to be part of this group!

We’ll also be posting informative posts to help you grow your business using our newsletters as well as social media. This will be a great place to help you take your newsletter and social media marketing to the next level. All you need to do is click here to join.

Can’t wait to see you there!

To get to your email newsletters, hover over Your Newsletters in the menu, then choose Email Newsletters.

Thank you to everyone who entered the 2015 Newsletter Marketer of the Year Contest.

We had some terrific responses - you made all of us here at Ready to Go Newsletters very happy.

And... the winner is...David Kaseman!

We had difficulty choosing just 2 runners up, so we chose 5 instead! They are: Barbie and Curtis Riley, Sandra Caton, Joan Hillegas, Vince Graves, and Phil Oliver.

Simon will be writing about the winners in the May issue of our own newsletter.

Thank you once again to everyone who entered.

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For US clients we have introduced the Every Door Direct Mail (EDDM) print template with your regular 4 page and 2 page newsletters. EDDM is an 8 ½ by 11 front and back mailer commonly used to target a specific audience through courier routes and zip codes. Think of it like a giant postcard that can be used to reach neighborhoods without having to know street addresses. The template is print ready so simply print it off and bring it to your local post office or contact kyla@readytogonewsletters.com for all your printing needs.

By Simon Payn

I just read some astonishing stats about real estate agents (but the same will likely apply to your business) in RISMedia.

• Only 18% of real estate brokerages generate repeat business

• Only 6% of agents with three to five years of experience generate repeat business

• Only 17% of agents with six to 17 years of experience generate repeat business

• Only 38% of agents with 16+ years of experience generate repeat business

And all this is despite the well-known fact that it’s something like seven times cheaper to get business from repeat clients than it is to go banging the bushes for new clients.

Of course, if you are new in business, all your clients are new. But as soon as you have just one happy client, it’s time to start building a relationship that will see that client come back next time.

All you need to do is keep in touch with useful, interesting information to make sure that your client remembers you as the caring professional that you are.

Here’s some simple math to prove my point.

In real estate, the average homeowner might move every seven years.

Imagine you have successfully closed 10 deals, so you have 10 clients to keep in touch with.

You can subscribe to our newsletter service for $697 per year, which gives you fresh content you can send every month. So, for each of your 10 clients, the cost is $69.70 per year. Multiply that for seven years to account for the average amount of time they might stay in a home, and the cost per client is $487.90.

Now, imagine what happens when these people want to list their homes. Conservatively, you might earn $4,000 from each deal (depending on the sale price and commission, of course). So that’s a profit after your keeping-in-touch costs of $3,512.10 per closing. This is money that you likely would not have earned if you had not kept in touch.

Then imagine you have 20 clients to keep in touch with. Or 50. Or 100.

You can do similar math for whatever business you are in.

Figure out how often a client could buy from you and work out how much you make each time that client buys. Then figure out the cost of keeping in touch with that client and subtract one from the other. Remember, if the amount you earn from each client is small, it’s likely they will buy more often and you will have a greater number of clients, which means that the cost of keeping in touch with each is much, much smaller.

When keeping in touch is so easy, it seems a no-brainer way to build your business and income.

Well, you know what I'm going to say - send both!

But seriously, let me explain the pros and cons of each.

Print newsletters

Pros:

• They are a physical object. There's something about being able to hold something in your hand that makes the communication more powerful.
• They won't get trapped in spam filters.
• They provide, in many cases, a better return on investment.
• You can send them even to people you don't know.

Cons:

• Relatively expensive to print and email
• More time-consuming to edit and prepare

Email newsletters

Pros:

• They are cheap and easy to send.
• You can send large numbers.
• You can send them frequently.

Cons:

• Some will get trapped in spam filters.
• People's inboxes are overflowing.
• You can send them only to people who have given you permission.

Here is what I suggest you do. This is, of course, just general advice. You must do what is right for your own business.

Collect as many email addresses as possible and send an email newsletter to each of your prospects and clients, at least once per month. Doing this is a no-brainer because you can send 1000 per month as part of your subscription with us, and even if you want to send more, it costs only $1.50 per 100 extra. Continue to collect email addresses to build your database.

However, just because email newsletters seem more modern and are cheaper, you should not ignore printed newsletters.

We advise you to collect as many mailing addresses as possible but be strategic as to who you send your print newsletters to. We find that best results come from sending to existing/past clients. In addition, you can get good results from sending newsletters to your recent leads and occasionally sending them to your list of older leads. It is, however, important to keep an eye on your return on investment - whether something makes sense for you depends on your response rate and your profit per item sold.

One thing to watch out for is sending out thousands of print newsletters to people who are not in your database. While this can work as a long-term strategy, the cost of doing a large mailing means that you have to have deep pockets. The danger is, you will run out of money before you are able to judge whether your strategy is working.

Newsletters are for people who think long-term. That's why we give a big break on our prices to people who are willing to commit for a year. It's no good sending out just a handful of newsletters for a couple of months and then giving up. You'll never know if they would have worked or not!

So...while you're thinking of whether to send print newsletters or email newsletters, consider how best to mix them up to get the biggest bang for your buck.

One of the metrics you can track in our email sending system (powered by VerticalResponse) is clicks through to your website.

(This metric is often overlooked - people usually focus on open rate, bounces and unsubscribes.)

However, it is clicks that best predict someone's interest in what you have to offer. After all, people who click are engaging with you and taking another step in their relationship with you. And, thanks to the detailed reporting we offer, you can see exactly which recipients have clicked through to your website.

That's great for identifying your most active prospects and clients.

But most people fall down when it comes to generating clicks.

It's one thing to put a link to your website in the newsletter.

But that's often not enough to generate a click.

This is why people don't get as many clicks as they think they should - they're not giving people a reason to click!

Here are some ideas to increase the number of clicks you get:

Create an offer. It's not usually enough to just give people your website address. Instead, you need to give them a reason to click through. This is done with an offer - a compelling reason to take action. That offer might be a special offer on a product or service, or it might be something as simple as a link to a free tool on your website (a quotations engine or listings search, for example).

When you set up your email newsletter, you can create content that stays there each month. We can add this for you in several places: the top of the left column, the top of the main column, and the bottom of the main column. You could use these places to put links to offers or to the most popular or important parts of your website.

Add links after relevant articles. At the end of articles in your newsletter, create links that go to a page on your website with further information on that topic, or details of a product or service you offer that relates to that topic.

Use buttons as well as links. VerticalResponse allows you to create buttons instead of just links. These can make your link more obvious and appealing. You can see more information on VR's buttons service at https://buttons.verticalresponse.com

I was talking with one of our clients yesterday. We make custom email newsletters for her, as well as one-off “blasts” for special messages.

And something became very clear: newsletters and special blasts are often quite different creatures.

Newsletters are for building relationships. You’re saying hello, remember me? When you need me, I’m here. And meanwhile, here is some information that you might find interesting, entertaining and useful.

Blasts are for when you want action. You’ve got one thing to say and one action that people can take. Maybe you’ve got a new product or a special offer. Or perhaps you want people to visit a new page on your website.

That’s not to say that you cannot put actions in a newsletter. But if you want the best response to a specific request, send it as a standalone blast.

Here’s one more thing: don’t just send blasts.
Newsletters are about giving, but blasts are about taking. Newsletters give information, blasts are often asking for a sale. So make sure you do plenty of giving before asking for something.

Did you know you can use the VerticalResponse system for sending blasts? There are lots of free templates you can use. We can also design blast templates for you with your own look and feel. Ask us if you need help with that.