 And welcome to your brand expert tips. Now today I have a very special video because I've had a question from Debbie Kinghorn who's asked me for my advice on how to create great email newsletters. So if you like Debbie are thinking about doing this for your business or you're already doing it and you'd like to get a better response from it then hopefully this video will help you too. So Debbie, first of all, what is your reason for creating this newsletter? Remember that most people are now trying to do a lot more with their time for a lot less money. So you're competing with a lot of distractions and other things that are trying to take up your customers and your prospects time. Now this means that your newsletter has only a few seconds to either engage the reader into reading your content or hitting the delete button or worse than that to market a spam so you get reported and your email account could get suspended. So think very carefully about what the purpose of your newsletter is and consequently about the content that you're gonna put into it to engage with a certain type of target audience. So what do you want it to do? Perhaps it's just for clients to keep them up to date with your services or maybe it is to send out to your prospects to get them interested in what you do. Maybe you wanna get them to your website for more information and then upsell them when you get them there or perhaps it's to sell as part of an ongoing membership program like we do. Maybe it's going to be used for data capture signups to your website or perhaps you want to drive people to your YouTube or social media channels so that you can continue to build rapport with them and update them throughout the month or potentially it could be something that you give out at events to position you as the brand leader of your field so that I mean they're gonna remember you far more when you follow up with that call, right? So there's so many things for you to think about and whatever your reason for creating this newsletter for your business, you must know exactly what the purpose is before you embark on it as it's not an easy thing to keep up with, believe me. And once you start doing it, people will start to expect it at the same time each month. So if your purpose isn't strong enough, then you'll soon make it less and less of a priority because you won't be getting out of it what you want. So be very clear about what it is that you're doing and what you want to get out of it. And I mean, you know, we've experienced this and I wanna share this experience with you because you know, I mean, even though we knew that our strategy and what it would be when we first started to create a monthly email newsletter, it's still evolved into something completely different. So, you know, just like you're the expert in what you do, Miles and I have built a reputation for ourselves as the brand brains with lots of people saying, oh, you've got to speak to the brand brains when they meet somebody who wants to build their brand, create a brand or experiment with something new to win more customers. Now with so many questions coming into us and sparking up ideas for blogs and videos and articles, Miles and I thought we'd write a regular monthly online newsletter to keep the heartbeat of our brand regularly beating with both our customers and new potential ones too. Maybe you want that also. Now our idea quickly expanded and before we knew it, we'd turned our small monthly email newsletter into a full color 24 page monthly magazine called BrandBrain, which you can buy at brandbrainmagazine.com. Now you see, I used to be the editor and the designer for a home building and property magazine and I also have a big background in design for print. So the idea of creating our own magazine, well, I just got so excited about it. But even greater than that is the opportunity for Miles and I to meet the top 1% of British action taking entrepreneurs who really inspire us and can educate small business owners on how to build a successful brand and give the power back to small businesses like you who don't have the same marketing budgets as the bigger corporate. So we realized that while our email newsletters were keeping our brand in front of people, they weren't making the difference that we really wanted to make on a bigger scale. So at that time, it was taking a lot of time to put together and we needed to start charging for it. Maybe you do that as well now. So how do you create content and value and get people to pay for it? Well, we turned some of the content from our email newsletters into what is now a light membership program as an introduction to our business at howtobildabrand.org. Now this builds our list, but then we turned the extra value into a greater online magazine resource packed full of ideas and marketing tips, advice, interviews and customer attraction strategies that people can pay £9.97 a month for. Now, Brownbrain is what we call our products for prospects because it's a low-cost introduction and a bit of a no-brainer for small business owners and marketing managers who want to get access to our wealth of information before they invest further in the relationship with us. Now, it's what we call part of a continuity program where customers subscribe to our magazine and they get loads of other benefits too on a monthly basis as part of a monthly membership package. But we have a very clear goal for our monthly magazine to position us at the go-to experts in the field of branding at the same time as filtering people into our sales pipeline who are genuinely interested in taking their business to the next level. So what can you do that is more interesting than simply creating an email newsletter or a printed newsletter? Could you create something that is different to any other newsletter out there? Or is there something different that you could, you know, another way to get information out there in front of your clients? Even better, is there a way of doing it so that you get paid to create it? Now, creating a newsletter isn't something you should decide to do lightly though. It does take a lot of time out of your business to create and you must continuously make time in your monthly diary to plan the content and give your readers what they really want to see. Now, it used to take me at least half a day to plan and create the content for our email newsletter, but it now takes me a day just to plan the magazine and liaise with contributors, half a day to interview our celebrity of the month and then edit the interview. It takes four days to design and edit the magazine and a further day to make final amends and output as an online flip magazine. Now, that's a whole week out of our business, which for us, we know it's worth it because we know our figures, we know what the sales of the magazine are and we have a very clear goal to increase the subscription by at least 200 new subscribers on an international level every month and that's very conservative, but it means that we're increasing the value of just this part of our business by at least 2,000 pound month on month, which is the equivalent of adding a further 24,000 pound a year to your business by creating something once and then selling it for a lifetime. But you could easily get caught up in spending a lot of time on a newsletter that you're giving away for free if you're not careful and you must know exactly how you're gonna monetize it if you're giving it away for free as there needs to be something that you sell on the back end of it once you've got their name and email address. It all comes back to having a clear goal for it and I know that I keep banging on about it but you need to have a very clear goal or you'll end up spending your time on something that you don't fully utilize to its greatest potential. Now, here are my top tips for you based on now knowing what the good points are and the not so good points if you're still gonna create a newsletter here is what I advise you to do. So if you, like Debbie, are definitely gonna create this newsletter hopefully you'll get some great ideas from what I'm about to share with you as well. So tip number one, your newsletter should be a bite-size read and it shouldn't take much time to get through. Ideally, it should take no longer than say five minutes to read so keep your articles short and sweet pointing them to more information on your website if they do want to explore the article further with you. Tip two, make sure your headlines are engaging and thought provoking so it draws people in to read it. Tip three, design your newsletter really well so that it'll make all the difference to whether it goes in the bin or either in their email bin or thrown in their office bin. You wanna engage them enough visually that they want to read it. Remember that people have very busy lives so they quickly sift through stuff to see what engages them and what goes in the bin and most of the time they do it without even reading it. So use a good mixture of images, colors and all sorts with your articles but don't clutter it or it will be too difficult to read. Tip four, avoid anything less than 12-point text and make sure that you use a font that is readable. Fancy fonts may look nice but you'll quickly disengage your readers if they're struggling to work out what it is that you're trying to say or it's too difficult on the eye. Now your headings and body copy fonts should also be consistent throughout your newsletter so keep all your headings the same text size and font and all your articles should also be the same text size and font as well. Tip five, if you're sending it out by email as a PDF avoid designing your newsletter right to the edges of the page because some people may like to print it out and they might like to read it on the way to a meeting or something. So likewise also think about the amount of ink that they're gonna use if they do print it out. Now if you're printing it with a proper printing company this doesn't matter so much but you should then think about the amount of colors and pages you're using to design it because the more colors and pages you use the more expensive it's going to get to print it and post it especially if you're using special colors such as Pantone colors. Tip six, newsletters look best in black or dark ink so stay away from colored ink for your text as it becomes difficult to read. Likewise black on white or light colored background is fine but do not do it the other way around. It may look effective but it's really really difficult on the eye you don't wanna give your readers a headache do you? Tip seven, always always always get your newsletter proofed by someone you know who is an absolute perfectionist where it comes to grammar and spelling. Sending it out a professional newsletter to customers with numerous spelling or grammatical errors and it really creates a negative image of your brand to your readers. Now you could use a spell checker but I do recommend that you also have an outsider edit your final copy as I just mentioned before. Now they should be looking out for readability, grammar, spelling and content to make sure that it makes sense. Tip eight, don't wait until last minute to create your newsletter or you'll end up rushing it and no doubt you'll make mistakes that you will regret later. So leave plenty of time to coordinate it and put it together so that you're in a in the right head space you know you're in the right state as you create it because it will come across in the words you use. Tip nine, make sure that you have a clear call to action at both the top of your newsletter and the bottom. If you want people to call you, have your phone number clearly displayed at the top and the bottom of your email. If you want people to join your Facebook page or you want them to connect with you on Twitter or LinkedIn, make sure that you put your social media buttons on there with links straight directly through to the page that you want them to connect to. Just don't put it all on there because you're not only cluttering your newsletter up but you're also making it look like there's too much to read and people put it in that I'll read that later bit. You'll also give them so much to do that they'll go into overwhelm and it's likely they won't do any of it at all. So give them one action and one action only. Now tip 10, use the space at the bottom of your newsletter to add useful links which take them to supplemental content such as upcoming events, popular articles, videos, latest offers or even another sales page where you can promote more free stuff to get them hooked in. Now a bonus tip for you is to fundamentally know your audience. If you know they're likely to be visual or creative people then they're not likely to read something. They are more likely though to watch something. So perhaps use less writing and include more links to videos in it. And remember also that most email programs block images so don't fill your newsletter with images because it's likely that they're just gonna come up as big red crosses. So it'll just make your newsletter look ugly and all out as sync and you don't really wanna do that because it looks horrible. Now if your target audience is likely to be more auditory then again they're not gonna take a lot of time to read something and you're not gonna connect with them. So you wanna give them something to listen to so use less words and give them a link to a podcast maybe. Now you must give your customers and prospects what they want so don't just throw stuff out there at them that will put them off. Instead ask them how they would like to receive your content. You know, what do they want best from you? You know, and then give them exactly what they've asked for. Now that's it for today. So let me know how you get on and if you've got any other questions for Miles or myself about branding, marketing or how to build your brand please do pop your comment in the box below this video or email me at sammie at howtobildabrand.org. Take care, have a great day and bye bye for now.