I recently spoke with someone about their newsletter. Their unsubscribe numbers were up and they asked me to take a look. Not a problem! I looked at a couple recent newsletters and noticed a very common mistake:Too Much Selling
You may be scaring potential clients away because you’re trying to sell to them ALL THE TIME. Back up.
The point of your newsletter is to educate your network so they WANT to hire you when it’s the right time FOR THEM. Your newsletter is consistent so when they are ready to buy they know where to find you. (This happened again for me last week!)
If you only are ever selling me stuff I’m less inclined to buy. Prove it. Show me how awesome you are each and every month in your newsletter with the knowledge you have to share.
I agree that there’s a lot of selling, but then how do you let people know you’ve got stuff that could help them? this is what I don’t understand.
You can sell, but tone it down a notch (or 10). My suggestion in this case was to streamline the message and only focus on one offering a month. If you have 5 great offers that’s AWESOME – and put that into 5 months of content. Your readers have a million other things going on each day – I’d much rather read a quick newsletter with one clear option and realize “nope, not the right fit for me.” Instead of having to decipher which one of these 5 is the right one for me right now.
Be clear in what your newsletter is supposed to do for your audience:
- Educate your audience about your awesomeness (you’re the expert, you can help them with this problem, you have the answers)
- Give them useful tools and/or information so they can try it themselves
- An option to work with you if outsourcing it or hiring someone is what they need
If you’re giving away too much information people will go in the opposite direction of what you want. Take a minute this week to review your newsletter – are you overwhelming people with options and they’re running away?
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