Email Marketing – Newsletter Creation and Content

As the year winds, down, I am feeling busier than ever. True enough, orders have slowed to a trickle (I hope that it’s because of the holidays and that it picks up in January), so I am taking the time to continue to dive deeper into my email marketing. Last post, I decided on the format I wanted my newsletter to take – no sales, info packed with content on how to raise a successful girl. I figured my audience were parents who might take share the newsletter with their daughters and women of all ages interested in girl power.

So I settled on my title – 7 Ways to Increase Your Girl Power in 2009, except I am afraid that this will be filtered by spam as something obscene, so I am going with 7 Ways to Make 2009 the Best Year Ever…
I will have a main article listing seven ways to increase your girl power in 2009 – it will be appropriate for almost all age. I’ll put an excerpt in the email and link back to the main site. I will also include a Girl Power quote, a trivia question, and maybe a tip or two for money saving all tied back to my recent series of posts on GirlMogul Magazine.

Other things on my email to do list:

I need to take all the new customers from the holiday shopping season and add them to a list – they will get a welcome email with a 15% off coupon. I need to do this the first week, because I would like them to get the newsletter as well, but I don’t want them to be overwhelmed by GirlMogul email campaigns, so I feel spacing the communication is important. My goal is to get the main email newsletter out no later than Jan 15th.

I have almost (like 95%) completed my free report that I will be using as an incentive when people sign up for the newsletter list. I need to add in a few images, convert it to pdf, and we should be good to go. Even something as simple as a free report – this one is 12 pages, I might call it a booklet, has taken a fair amount of effort to write and put together. I did my research, wrote, re-wrote and formatted to create something I feel really has value. I am proud of it and excited to share. On the other hand, this kind of work, which seems to be all the background and isn’t something tangible like shipping orders or answering emails, can make a small business owner feel antsy – in other words we sometimes focus on the busy tasks, rather on doing the longer term foundation work. So I am very glad I am almost done, so I can implement this strategy and see how it works. As always – will keep you posted.

Phew! I certainly feel better now that I have laid out a plan. Next week I will be posting my New Year’s resolutions for making sure that 2009 is a profitable and successful year for my business. I will be on vacation for the rest of the week – one of the perks of being the boss.