Eye Feasts Are Popular for Business Newsletters
How do you like your email newsletters?
Some people just want the words, zero frills, just the facts, life's too short for any nonsense.
Others enjoy a more playful approach, maybe even some coloured text.
And then there are those who aren't happy unless they are treated to a joyous extravaganza of visual delight that explodes all over their eyeballs.
We asked our audience on LinkedIn. Here is the result:
What's your preference? (Will you let us know?)
Give Your Customers an Empowering Super-Exclusive Experience
(This month's "newsletters-are-kinder-to-humans-than-social-media" item)
One of the smashing things about email newsletters is how they make the subscriber feel like they are an insider, certainly compared with social media.
Social media is all out in the open. It's all very extrovert and visible and quite loud.
Newsletters happen in a private space: someone's email software—where it's just you and the subscriber. A place where you can give them your undivided attention.
Better still, to even get the email, the subscriber has to have joined a super-exclusive club. Let's face it, even if you have tens of thousands of subscribers, that's a trifle compared with the billions of people on social media platforms. By comparison, joining a mailing list is like joining a secret society.
And who doesn't like feeling they're part of something exclusive and secret?
It gets even better.
Newsletters are an empowering experience for your subscribers. The subscriber is in complete control. They get to choose:
✅ whether to subscribe
✅ whether to read a particular issue
✅ when to read it
✅ how much they read
Compare that with social media platforms, where the algorithm decides if, what, where and when to thrust something on you.
Newsletters are democracies. Social media platforms are dictatorships—and not even the benign kind.
You might say, "You're biased."
We would reply, "Yes."
(It would be a very short conversation.)
Make Space:
Work by Others We Adore
We're a sucker for marketing that makes use of the physical space it's in. Here are some more examples:
"Always first"
"Entry. Exit"
Some businesses have lots of products to sell. A wine shop, for instance, has plenty of choice and variety. So, for them, putting together a newsletter can be as simple as picking a vineyard, writing a super-enlightening and devilishly entertaining piece, adding a buy button to a relevant bottle and job done. Each week, a new vineyard and a new bottle. It would take most wine shops several years to fill a weekly newsletter with everything they have on their shelves, one issue at a time.
But if you only sell a limited range of products, you can't do that. You'd end up repeating yourself pretty quickly, even if you published monthly. People would notice. And you'd run out of things to say. But you still want to sell your limited range of products through your newsletter. So what do you do?
One solution is to write about how a product could be used—one use per newsletter. For instance, and let's be extreme here, you bake one kind of biscuit. Nothing else. Just one kind. Well, your biscuit is great for elevenses, a mid-afternoon pick-me-up, an evening nibble, a treat in your child's lunch box, a terrific addition to the employee coffee station (even better, put one on everyone's desk), a brilliant reward after exercise (or fuel during), a hyper-convenient dessert (just add ice cream), a boost when you're low, etc. Each one is a story.
And each story is a building block for a newsletter.
Food for Thought
Bord Bia (the Irish Food Board) has put out a guide with practical advice about email marketing:
Still Asking for a Friend
[Roger here, speaking from the heart]
For many people, cancer is an enemy that has to be fought on many fronts. The major battlefield is inside their body. One of the bitterest secondary fronts is the financial one, where you may have to deal with sky-high medical expenses (and the day-to-day household bills) at a time when your capacity to earn is reduced or completely wiped out. I speak from experience when I say the financial stress of cancer can be horrendous.
My dear friend and sometime business collaborator Karl Hyden (that's him above with his wife Kay) is fighting cancer right now. He's been in this bitter battle pretty much since the day I was told mine was in remission: over 3 years ago. He's fought hard and continues to beat the odds. But being unable to work, while paying towards a treatment available on national health services elsewhere in the EU and in the UK but not in Ireland, means he's running low on financial ammo. In fact, it's depleted.
The treatment has had a huge beneficial impact on him. But he needs to keep funding it himself. So his children have set up a GoFundMe campaign to fund the treatment he needs for the rest of the year. They've made great strides and just need a little last push to get over their target. If you're curious about helping, here's the link:
Cheap Shot: Video
Here's an example of a simple and cheap business video. We think it's fabulous—but we made it, so make of that what you will. (Yes, blatant self-promotion here in the dispatch.)
Outrageous plug for S&T:
We produce videos and put them in your dispatches
Your next step...
Thank you, as always, for letting us into your inbox and for giving your valuable time to reading this dispatch. We'd love to know what you thought of it. Here is your direct line to us: hello@showandtell.ie.
See you again next month,
Roger, Anne & Paul
PS—You can find back issues of this newsletter and a sign-up button here (in case this email was forwarded to you):
"SHOW and TELL in a way that your audience can SEE and HEAR"