You may not have thought about it, but newsletters are the oldest and most effective social media tool around! Are you taking it for granted? Here are the top 5 reasons that you should put newsletter at the center of your social media strategy:

1. Leverage Your Content from Blogs, Whitepapers and Social Media Posts If you are like most companies, you are continuously blogging, posting to social media sites like LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter, writing whitepapers, creating customer success stories and Web content. Why not get the most from your content development? Your newsletter can be the place where you can bring all that content together. Most of the content can be easily “cut and pasted” into your newsletter with links to either the full article or the blog or social media outlet.

2. Demonstrate Your Commitment to Your Customer and Partner Relationships For existing customers and partners, the newsletter allows you to communicate to your most valuable assets – customers and partners on a regular basis. Although a newsletter is a wonderful sales tool, it can also let you demonstrate your interest and commitment to your customers and partners by offering industry whitepapers, training, Webinars and product advice that can help grow their businesses (and revenues to you!)

3. Get a Complete Picture of All Prospect, Customer and Partner Touchpoints Most companies today are able to integrate their communications with their CRM systems. Even the basic CRM systems allow you to track the various interactions with your company. How valuable is it for your sales and marketing teams to know which customers, partners and prospects are engaging with you across multiple channels? Your newsletter can be the catalyst to begin the integration with CRM.

4. Consistent Nurturing and Sharing of Content Contact with your customers, partners and prospects shouldn’t be a one-off event but integrated into a consistent nurturing campaign. Your newsletter is a great way to assure that you are communicating on a regular basis to your customers, partners and prospects. Having a regular publishing schedule will put pressure on content creators to regularly publish and provide content.

5. Drive More Leads and Traffic to Your Website Adding Website links from the newsletter to content on your Website assures regular visits to your Website and a subsequent increase in repeat traffic. At the least, this is worth the effort to regularly send out a newsletter. But consider this additional benefit: You can include a link to “Send the Newsletter to a Friend” to further extend your reach both within your known customer, partner and prospect organizations, as well as potentially adding new organizations and contacts. Most newsletter and emailing systems allows you to track this pass along traffic.

If you currently have a newsletter, consider how you can expand the use and the reach. If you currently do not have a newsletter, why not take advantage of the content you have and improve your communication to customers, partners and prospects?

For more information about starting, integrating and improving your newsletter into your social media strategy, contact Larry Fournier at fourthman@usa.com.

Tratto da Lawrence Fournier