The Newsletter Is Not Dead

So, if you are one of those thinking that newsletter is dead…It is time to reconsider. Newsletter is alive and when it is used properly is still an affordable and powerful tool to reach your prospects and customers and measure results almost immediately.

The newsletter as a tool has moved from a “plain template” to a more design and especially -call to action- oriented tool. Now using this tool with others channels can complement your marketing strategy. Measuring its impact is as well easier and more affordable than years ago.

How to create useful newsletters for your customers:

Forget the past: or better to say forget all you know and remember about the newsletter that you sent ten years ago. It’s is time to refresh your newsletter template and your way of managing this tool.  

Evaluate your audience: The newsletter is pretty much alive in many industries, however is it worth checking your audience before using this or any other marketing tool. Not all generations, consumers, industries are interesting in receiving newsletters too often. Check what your target group is? What do you want to achieve? Checking your audience might help you as well to find out what they are talking about and what they are interested in. Are you using other tools? Is the newsletter going to be your unique marketing channel? Or a complement to the other channels you use for marketing? How are you planning to combine different channels?

Inform, entertain and communicate sufficiently: check how much information you might have on regularly basis and how much you want to share with your customers. Be regular, even if you decide to create two newsletters per year, select coordinated time for it and plan it well. When deciding how many newsletters you need to prepare in a period of time, remember to be realistic evaluating if you have enough –fresh- material to create the newsletter as well as if you have the time and the resources to create it as often as planned.

Make your newsletter clear: both in terms of content as well as in terms of visual. Select three or four main topics to talk about per newsletter. Make the information easy to digest. Good visuals are mandatory. Also remember to consider different platforms when designing your content, specially now when many customers are reading your material from the phones and tablets.

Limit your marketing: Despite the newsletter being a marketing tool, you need to calm down. Instead of over marketing your products, use this channel to share your thoughts and train your readers. They are willing to get more value than a bunch of info about your products and services.

Localize:especially if you have a big database already, you might face that many of your customer speaks different languages than for example English. Check your main audiences and select the languages which you might use on your newsletter.

  

Follow-up, monitor and take actions: Nowadays, more and more you can find different ways to evaluate the newsletter performance: are people visiting the links, who are opening your newsletter, where are they located, which products or news are the most visited, are they going to your website, are they contacting you, etc. After you collect all the data and make the basic analysis, select the follow-up steps.

Clean your database:  If you are using a big database with customer info which has been collected over the years -many years, the newsletter is a good and frequent way to clean your database. At the beginning, you might get a lot of movement out there (e.g. subscriptions cancellations, invalid email addresses, people who are no longer in some companies, etc.) Do not be afraid of all this overwhelming data, this is a natural process and a perfect opportunity to take away people who are not interested in your products or in your company. Who wants to have thousands of email addresses without a real actions?

The point of the newsletter is to create quality content. A good newsletter will keep your good customer and your potential prospects coming back. Keep the content simple but useful and use the data obtained from it performance to follow-up. Invest the appropriate time and resources based on your company's situation. Whatever content you are delivering to your customer in the newsletter, make it relevant. Your newsletter might be your introduction letter to many new customers. Make this represents your brand well.

Outsourcing Social Media Management

Yes, you know that social media is out there and you want that your customers find you and your products online, so you just need to do it. Unfortunately, social media is not something that you just do -couple of minutes here and other two minutes there, without a strategy. As any other part of your communication, media relations, and marketing activities, social media deserves respect if you want to see results. In fact, social media requires time and brain investment and especially, your availability to react fast, perhaps faster than when we talk about the traditional channel.  

So if you have no time for Twitter, Facebook or LinkedIn, you don’t feel very confident with these channels, or you have no intention to hire a full time person for this role, your best option is to outsource your social media management. However, sorry for disappointing you, your job does not end there when you sign your contract with a social media freelancer or with an agency. This contract is just a commitment to work together building your brand and even taking your selling activities to a new level.

What to do when outsourcing your social media management?  

- Find an agency with team members who actually know what they are doing. The social media channels speak by themselves, check the people’s activities and the agency’s previous campaigns: what kind of content do they prepare? How they act or react on the channels? How they look like out there?

- After finding the agency, the most important is to let them do their job. Give the agency they right tools, information and contacts to get seeds for their content. Your agency has to be supported by a variety of people with experience in your particular industry and company, especially at the beginning. They will not able to generate genuine content if they don’t get the basic knowledge from the company. Or they will not be able to generate content if you need to approve all their work, word by word, and you have no time for that.

- Delegate a social media “manager” inside your company who will manage your relations with the agency, and especially who will make sure that they get all the info that they need for preparing the content. Your social media manager does not need to be the full time doing this job, you can use for example your PR, Marketing or Communications to do this. However, remember that social media management requires time, so considering this with assigning the tasks/role. 

- Organize regular “content” meetings in which people from your company can share ideas and your agency can show regular results - what works, what doesn’t...how to improve. In other words, constructive meetings. The meetings are very useful for your agency to get to know more about your company, your products, your people and your company culture.

Try new things and fail. This is the only way how you and your agency will know what actually works out there, for example in your industry. The good things is that social media is more affordable than the traditional channels which means that if you fail you will not go bankrupt

- Connect your agency activities with your employees’ social media actions. In addition to training your personnel on how to use the channels, you need to connect the inside (your employees) with the outside (your agency) so your brand is shown as a one and only one brand. Your inside social media manager might help you synchronizing these “two parts”.   

Manage your expectations and be realistic. It takes time to create engagement on the channels, so don’t expect miracles in a week. Monitor and measure often.

Outsourcing social media management can give you access to a talent pool of people with a full disposition to manage your channels at a lower cost than a full time employee. A good social media company will work hard to develop a voice for your brand that works, however, if you leave this social media agency relationship abandoned on a pile of paper on your desk, you are at risk of creating an inconsistent brand, or nothing at all. So remember, if you work with an agency, make them “part of your team” and give them what they need to make your brand to shine.

My Favorite Things About Finland

I am celebrating 11 years in Finland. Time flies!!!

To celebrate, I am listing 11 things I love about Finland: 

Nature and the seasons: Finland is so beautiful. I recommend you having your camera ready if you are coming to visit. The lakes, the forest, the majestic scenarios… I read somewhere that Finland is the country in Europe with most forests and it has more than 1800 lakes. All those places look so beautiful in each season. Each season has their own charm. The summer is for sure my favorite, understandable coming from a tropical country, right? There are no many sunny or warm days in Finland...So, in addition to enjoying the weather, it is fascinating to see how people act here during those days. During the summer Finns try to do -everything-: barbecuing, going to the summer cottage, enjoying the summer festivals, sit outside to drink a beer or two in the terraces, swimming, sailing, going for a walk, partying, getting married, graduating, eating a lot of sausages, training in the park, running marathons, partying again, taking care of the garden, biking, etc. 

One lake in Finland. No filter.

How the Finns take care of the environment. Of course, nature is very important for them and they know how to take care of the environment: they recycle, many of them use public transportation to commute, others prefer the bikes or if they need to drive their cars they might arrange share rides with 3 or 4 people going to the same direction. It is something about the culture, that makes taking care of the environment part of their habits and routines. For example, in the stores you can find more and more products which are coming from closer areas e.g. local farms, and many Finns prefer to buy those products to avoid transporting and polluting the environment by bringing similar products from remote places.  

The Sauna: do I really need to explain why I love this? Yes, we have saunas in Venezuela, too. However, for Finns this is a kind of temple (where they can drink!?), and going to sauna is their ritual. It is very common to find saunas I their own places or at least in their own buildings. For Finns, there is no summer without the sauna and jumping into the lake. Did I ever mentioned, that I thought when I moved to Finland, that all people needed to go together to the sauna, naked. I was not ready for this. Fortunately, it is not very common to find mixed naked saunas. Yes, those exist, but those are not the common rule. Phew!

The tranquility: I know that for many foreigners, Finland is extremely calm. Luckily, I enjoy it. Perhaps, I have my doses of chaos from my native city. Here I can walk around without feeling anxious about too many people around me. If I compare to my native Caracas, the use of public transportation is remarkably more relaxed. When using the metro or the buses I don’t need to push people to get in. Also, most of the time it feels very safe to be out there. If you leave in an apartment, you will also notice that they are very calm and you don’t need to worry too much about having neighbor partying very load and very often. 

This is Helsinki Centre.

The equality: Finland is one of the most egalitarian countries in the world. It does not matter if you are "rich or poor" you will have the same access to education, healthcare, and opportunities in general. The social classes are not so clearly seen when you walk on the streets as for example in Venezuela. By my own experience, I can say that there are still some challenges on how Finland can manage foreigners as a workforce but, in general, if you have your permission to be here, and you pay your taxes you also get similar opportunities than the natives in terms of education, healthcare, etc. I am very thankful for that. I can also emphasis that the difference between genders is not as remarkable as in other countries. You can see that at very early stage. For example, here the boys and the girls all learn to cook, clean, fix the clothes, make laundry and iron both- at home and at the school. Yes, they teach how to cook at the schools.

The typical food to celebrate almost everything. Perfect for a foodie. Finns have particulars food for the main festivities and for some local celebrations. A funny fact:  It is very common to find pea soup at the school or workplace restaurants every Thursday. Usually, Finnish pancakes with cream and jam are served as a dessert. Finns are very good at preparing some festivities desserts: they have cakes and pies to celebrate many -very interesting- things. They also use a lot of their own seasonal products such as berries, mushrooms, apples and own fishes to prepare their food.  

Semla, Sweet bun roll or Laskiaispulla, which is normally eaten on Shrove Tuesday.

Runeberg's cake, eaten on Feb 5th to celebrate the Finnish National Poet, Johan Ludvig Runeberg

Berries from my previous house garden. Sorry, no cake!

Libraries: Yes, I am a nerd. I love their libraries a lot, and I have used those at least thousand times. You can find almost whatever book you want for free. And sometimes if the book is not available, they can order this for you. You just need to have your library card with you. No doubt, the Finnish libraries are an example for many other countries.

Santa Claus: If you think that Santa Claus is from North America as I thought when I was a little girl, you are wrong. Santa is from Finland and He lives in Lapland. Finns have this beautiful tradition, Santa actually visits each home on December 24 to give the presents to the kids. I can testify, I have seen Him.

Less corruption and best education: Finland is one of the less corrupted countries in the world and has been ranked as the country with the best education in the world, too. I think these two things are very important in a country and very much related. 

Internet access. Finland was the first country to declare broadband Internet access a legal right, and believe me it works. In Finland, Internet is available and affordable. Kids have access to computers, cell-phones and Internet when they are very young, too. Most of the services are offered via Internet (online), which means that you can save a lot of time for example by paying everything online, from normal services like electricity to the movie tickets, and ordering pizza. Perhaps, this is something that we take for granted when we are here, but when we travel to other countries, we notice the lack of Internet access and how amazing is to have this easy access in Finland.

Finnish people: Finns are not very talkative at first which can be a challenge for those coming to Finland from more talkative countries... But when you get to know them you discover their real personality, you can actually have great conversations with them for hours. The majority of them are very honest and that is one of the values that I appreciate the most. So, when a Finn say that is your friend, he/she really means it. I feel very lucky to have good Finnish friends.

These 11 years have been a journey. I have learned so much about this country which is now my home, and about myself. I really love Finland. I am very lucky to be here. (Well, I have my doubts in November when I usually feel like moving to an island in the Caribbean, but...)

Thank you Finland for this experience, but especially, thank you to my Finnish husband, all my friends and my family here for been an essential part of this journey.