Most businesses earn their keep through repeat customers, it is returning customers that are the lifeblood of a business. Businesses that don’t get this end up going under. While new customer acquisition is of course important it plays second fiddle to customer retention, at least in a successful business. One of the best ways to keep your customers with you and “bond” with them is through a newsletter. But not just any newsletter but a newsletter that covers everything that I’m going to lay out here.
Doesn’t matter if it’s e-mail or print newsletter (though print is obviously way more powerful and something that I’d recommend everyone experiment with in their business, and make it goes out at least once a month) the principles are the same. Following these four steps will have your customers waiting with bated breath for when your newsletter finally arrives. So let’s get started with step one for newsletters that’ll bring customers back like crazy.
Step #1 – Tell A Story
Could be about the dumbest thing ever so long as it conveys something about you and isn’t boring it’ll work well. I don’t have to tell you that people love to hear stories and newsletters are no exception to this. Don’t bog down your newsletter with boring facts about how they can make money, get in better shape, or whatever else you think your newsletters about. Sure some facts are fine but it should be 80% stories, fun, and what’s in step #2 and 20% actual content (that most people don’t care about anyways). So make sure that each and every newsletter you’re telling a fun and engaging story that’ll hook them in.
Step #2 – Establish An Emotional Connection
So entertaining stories are great but stories about yourself and your life that has emotional trigger points that others can connect with is even better and something that you need to be doing. Tell stories about your kids, failures, and life. Things that your target market can identify with and bond with you over. Share yourself and others will respond to that. Having an emotional connection with your customers is way more important than delivering a good service or product (though those things do count for something). They should feel like they’re good old friends with you, they shouldn’t feel like customers of a vendor but rather friends.
Step #3 – Make Them Feel Good About Themselves
Making people feel good things about themselves is addictive and gets people hooked, doesn’t matter if it’s complete B.S. (just look at Oprah and Tony Robbins). Make your customers feel good about themselves. Compliment them, highlight their accomplishments, tell them that they should be proud of themselves and that they’re special. Doesn’t matter if you run a newsletter selling donuts to people who weight over 500 lbs make them feel like they’re the greatest thing ever and they’ll keep throwing you their cash. So make sure every newsletter that it makes your customers feel good.
Step #4 – Make Them Feel Superior To Others
This ties in with what I’m talking about above but is a separate thing. You need to not only make them feel good about themselves but also feel superior to others. For example telling someone they should be proud of something is one thing and should certainly be done. But to tell someone they should be proud of something because they’re so much better than their sister now is an entire other thing. Get what I’m saying? So it’s not enough to just make people feel good about themselves but to feel superior to others. How strong or subtle you are with this depends on the target market.
Build The Bond, Rake In The Money
The first critical thing to understand when running a business and trying to make money is that humans are in no way, shape, or form logical creatures and when we treat each other as such we end up broke and wondering why. Newsletters are great for retention because they’re great at relationship building. And relationship building is paramount to making money after all relationship trumps product, message, service, content, skill, “rightness”, or anything else in business. We are all emotional creatures who respond to emotional things.
The money is in the emotions, never forget that. Also you want to be a leader not a teacher to your customers. Teachers are boring and no one likes them, leaders are fun and people love them (and they get the big bucks). This site is a huge exception because one, it’s not a money maker for me but pretty much a charity and two men wanting to be their best are probably 0.0001% of the population if that.
If you have any questions you would like to see answered in a future post send them to me at charlessledge001 (at) gmail (dot) com. If you found value in this post then I would encourage you to share this site with someone who may need it as well as check out my books here. I appreciate it.
-Charles Sledge
