One way to make newsletters valuable to your subscribers is to include special offers or coupons in the newsletter that they can use online. Including special offers as part of your overall newsletter strategy provides an incentive for your subscribers to both stay on your email list, and open your newsletter. Not only that, but providing offers can help your company reach business goals and grow your existing client base, by hopefully gaining new customers. Newsletter offers can either be hard offers, like a promotion, or soft, like value added brand related information.
There are some keys to good newsletter special offers that you should follow to get the best response rate. Your newsletter should have a strong, clear call to action that instructs your readers on what you want them to do. This should be included in your newsletter as a link to your landing page, the offer, explains further if necessary, and streamlines the conversion process. Making the offer exclusive to email subscribers is a way to retain your subscribers and give them incentive to continue reading your newsletter. Also, having a time sensitive offer encourages your readers to use the offer right away. Its also important that you have a way to track who uses your offer to determine conversion rates and the success of your campaign.
Promotional Offer Guidelines
Do
- Make relevant to targeting & segmentation
- Meet or beat your offline offers
- Meet or beat your compeitior’s offers
- Use timely and seasonally appropriate offers
- Make the offer exclusive to the email channel
- Put the offer in the subject line
- Make it easy to redeem
- Deliver on the promise
Don’t
- Make it inconvenient to redeem
- Make it too long or complicated to respond
- Make an offer when it isn’t competitive
- Select an offer too hard for you to fulfill or track redemption
Here are some examples of companies using promotional emails in creative ways. Take a look and get some inspiration to include your own offer in your next newsletter.